#And they look exactly like unicellular organisms!

[thefaestolemyname]

Each time a white blood cell, noble guardians of my veins, dies in gruesome battle they give a last cry and a final prayer. I, their god, hear them and whisper as I hold their fading souls: "more than enough, you are loved, and your cherished work is part of a story greater than you'll ever know"

[thehereticpharaoh]

The Great Sphinx

Who Built the Sphinx? The Sphinx Temple Has the Answer by Mark Lehner

Many alternative thinkers claim the Sphinx is much, much older, that it existed thousands of years before Khufu. But our study of the Sphinx and the temple lying just below it—the Sphinx Temple—says no. As certain as we can be about such matters, Khafre created most of the Sphinx. However, Khufu might have started it.

The stone-by-stone map of the Sphinx Temple allowed us to investigate a telltale clue about who built the Sphinx. Quarrymen cut the core blocks (the ones forming the core of the temple walls) so thick—some weigh up to a hundred tons—that many of them include three geological layers. And it was clear that the layers in many blocks were the same as those that run through the bedrock of the Sphinx itself. The blocks had to have come from the U-shaped ditch around the Sphinx. When workers quarried the ditch they left a large block of limestone from which the Sphinx was carved.

As I moved about the Sphinx Temple during my first year of the mapping project, I was struck by how the geological layers run continuously in many places, from one block to another, as the layers must have run in the bedrock. The gangs of young men who moved these mighty stones did not have much chance of mixing them up from quarry to temple wall. The Sphinx and its temple must have been part of the same quarry-construction sequence. But could I prove this?

The following year I met Tom, who had the expertise needed to geologically “fingerprint” the blocks and trace them back to the quarry. Tom looked at the Giza Plateau less as an archaeological site and more as frozen sea floors, petrified, pancaked, and stacked into the bedrock layers from which the pyramid builders quarried blocks, created tombs, and carved the Sphinx.

These layers formed during the Eocene epoch—some 34 to 56 million years ago, as a great primordial sea retreated northward. Under its ebbing waters, a colossal bank of nummulites, unicellular plankton-like organisms, built up. A sandbar developed on the embankment, and in the more protected waters behind it, a shoal and coral reef grew. As the sea retreated to the north, the area behind the sand bank became a muddy lagoon, inhabited by burrowing bivalves and sea urchins. A regular sequence accumulated, which petrified as soft, yellow, marly layers interspersed with harder beds.

In carving the Sphinx directly from the natural rock, the ancient Egyptian quarrymen cut a cross-section through the principal geological layers of the southeastern slope of the Moqattam Formation. The hard layers of the shoal and reef, for example, make up the lowest layer in the Sphinx and its ditch.

Tom and I began our Sphinx Temple core block study by examining each layer, or bed, of the Sphinx. We gave each bed a number and marked them on photographs and on profiles of the Sphinx. The beds were easy to distinguish as they weathered differentially: harder beds protruded, softer beds receded. Also, the relative abundance of different fossils varied. Members I and II showed the greatest differences: I is a very hard gray reef formation, while the first bed of Member II, 2b, is one of the softest of the yellow marl-clay layers. Members II and III are distinct, but the boundary is not so clear as between I and II. Aigner, following an earlier geologist, set the boundary between Beds 7 and 8.

The massive fine-grained bedrock of Beds 8–9 made for good sculpting, with far more endurance than the soft-hard-soft sequence of Member II. This is why the 4th Dynasty builders reserved Member III for the more exposed head. Details like the eyebrows have survived wind, rain, and sand for 4,500 years.

But from which beds exactly did they cut the core blocks? Would this tell us where they were in fashioning the Sphinx at the time they built the Sphinx Temple? To answer these questions we logged each block. We recorded their lithic qualities and fossil content, and assigned each block to one of seven types, A through G.

Most of the Sphinx Temple core blocks are Type A and consist of three layers: upper and lower hard massive layers separated by the soft, yellow marl layer in the middle, which runs continuously through separate blocks over long stretches of temple wall. These blocks come from beds that correspond to the lower chest of the Sphinx.

Type C blocks come from beds that correspond to the Sphinx’s upper chest, top of the chest, and base of the neck. In the Sphinx Temple these blocks cluster near the front. The quarry workers hewed the blocks from layers that would become the lion’s upper chest and top of the back and then dragged them to the eastern front of the Sphinx Temple. As quarry workers cut deeper, to the middle and lower Sphinx chest level, haulers and builders composed most of the core walls of the temple.

Block types B and D did not come from the Sphinx ditch. They most closely match strata to the southwest, exposed in the quarry cut for the Khentkawes Monument. They are less frequent and more intermittent in the temple walls than the A and C blocks. This could indicate that the builders stockpiled these blocks and brought them into the walls whenever there was a hiatus in the quarrying, dragging, and placing of the A blocks from the Sphinx ditch.

Khafre’s workers started shaping the Sphinx as they built his valley temple. And they were probably still shaping the lower lion body, cutting it out of its surrounding ditch, as they made the Sphinx Temple, Khafre’s last major addition to his pyramid complex. But they did not finish. They left the Sphinx Temple incomplete, without its exterior granite casing.

[thesumlax]

On Deviantart I titled this Dream Sketches page "A New Record" because 21 is the largest number of entries yet, and also because I spent the longest time procrastinating on posting them...

Also, I decided that the grid format with six drawings to a page makes them way too small for my liking. On the other hand, I tried a new method of cleaning them up, by meticulously painting the sketches with a selection brush so I can leave all of the dirt behind when I move them... and it does produce great result, but the time waste is crazy.

Anyway:

1) Something like a living cavern monster, with a rock shell and jelly-like flesh. It`s basically hollow inside, and its organs are semi-autonomous entities crawling among those giant papillae on the floor. The bubble-backed thing crawling out is a reproductive one, it produces some strange reproductive bodies that look like either fried eggs or sausages crossed with some unicellular organisms (2). They`re not sex cells, hovewer, but still multicellular structures more like gametophytes.

3) Giant sand-swimming dragon with a bunny face and some fucked-up sand-ship glued to its back.

4) Just a trio of little guys! May have been video game characters who have to escape some sort of bad place by using their abilities (umbrella, spinning hand, and a fucking gun) in combinations. They`re colored red, blue and green.

5) Some sort of sea creature calles something like "trychnotus" or "trychaetus".

6) Another sea monster that kinda looks like a rubber toy.

7) Ghostly transparent axolotl-creature.

8) An erect-limbed toad. For some reason it`s important to note that it is exactly 12 cm tall.

9) A gliding, stinger-tailed draconic creature.

10) A bear-like omnivorous therizinosaurid survivng to the modern day. Started as spec evo but suddenly tranformed into horror movie monster for some reason.

11) Tiny-headed deer-o-saurus.

12-13) Two weird pitch-black horses from two unrelated dreams. Number 13 had its eyes and those weird cracks glowing bright neon green.

14) Bizarre elephantoids. The pitcher-trunk is especially fun.

15) Allegedly some sort of early pterosaur.

16) Don`t really know what that is... Seems to be made of brown rock?

17) Now this was a dream about some superhero who could shrink down do bug size and interact with sapient bugs (of the freakishly human-faced cartoon variety). These bugs had cars, which were also bugs (pictured). Bizarrely, the bug civilization existed in the same exact spaces as human civilization despite the size difference, with human roads having lanes for bug-cars.

18) A giraffe-dragon of some kind?

19) Another thing I don`t even know the context of. The humanoid head does not have a mouth despite the teeth.

20) Something like a gorgon.

21) Pelican dragon. Apparently can spray toxic mist like a crop duster, presumably through pores in its pouch.

[suzilight]

Meet the first animal found that doesn't need oxygen to live

In 2020, scientists discovered a jellyfish-like parasite that lacks a mitochondrial genome – the first multicellular organism ever found with such an absence. This means it doesn't breathe; in fact, he lives completely free from oxygen dependence.

Species Henneguya salminicola 

This discovery doesn't just change our understanding of how life might work here on Earth – it could also have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life. Life began developing the ability to metabolize oxygen – that is, breathe – more than 1, 45 billion years. A larger archaeon engulfed a smaller bacterium, and somehow the bacterium's new home was beneficial to both parties, and the two remained together.

This symbiotic relationship resulted in the joint evolution of the two organisms and, eventually, the bacteria installed in them became organelles called mitochondria. Every cell in your body, except red blood cells, has a large number of mitochondria, and these are essential for the respiratory process.

They break down oxygen to produce a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, which multicellular organisms use to power cellular processes.

We know that there are adaptations that allow some organisms to thrive in low-oxygen or hypoxic conditions. Some unicellular organisms have developed mitochondria-related organelles for anaerobic metabolism; but the possibility of exclusively anaerobic multicellular organisms has been the subject of some scientific debate.

That was until a team of researchers led by Dayana Yahalomi of Tel Aviv University in Israel decided to take a new look at a common salmon parasite called Henneguya salminicola.

It is a cnidarian, belonging to the same phylum as corals, jellyfish and anemones. Although the cysts it creates in the fish's flesh are unsightly, the parasites are not harmful and will live with the salmon throughout its life cycle.

Hidden within its host, the tiny cnidarian can survive quite hypoxic conditions. But it's difficult to know exactly how this happens without looking at the creature's DNA – and that's what the researchers did.

They used deep sequencing and fluorescence microscopy to conduct a detailed study of H. salminicola and discovered that it had lost its mitochondrial genome. Furthermore, it has also lost the capacity for aerobic respiration and almost all nuclear genes involved in the transcription and replication of mitochondria. Like unicellular organisms, it has developed organelles related to mitochondria, but these are also unusual – they have folds in the inner membrane that normally are not seen.

The same sequencing and microscopic methods in a closely related cnidarian fish parasite, Myxobolus squamalis, were used as a control and clearly showed a mitochondrial genome.

These results showed that here was, finally, a multicellular organism that did not need oxygen to survive.

Although H. salminicola is still a mystery, the loss is largely consistent with a general trend in these creatures – a trend toward genetic simplification. Over many, many years, they basically evolved from a free-living jellyfish ancestor into the much simpler parasite we see today.

They lost most of the original jellyfish genome, but retained – strangely – a complex structure reminiscent of jellyfish stinging cells. They don't use them to sting, but to cling to their hosts: an evolutionary adaptation of the free-living jellyfish's needs to those of the parasite. You can see them in the image above – they're things that look like eyes.

The discovery could help fisheries adapt their strategies to deal with the parasite; although it's harmless to humans, no one wants to buy salmon full of strange little jellyfish.

But it's also an incredible discovery to help us understand how life works.

“Our discovery confirms that adaptation to an anaerobic environment is not exclusive to single-celled eukaryotes, but also evolved in a multicellular parasitic animal,” the researchers explained in their paper, published in February 2020.

“Therefore, H. salminicola provides an opportunity to understand the evolutionary transition from an aerobic to an exclusively anaerobic metabolism.”

The research was published in PNAS .

[lichenaday]

Since lichen is a composite organism, what would theoretically happen if you separated each part? What would de-lichenized fungus look like, and vice versa?

Oooo, a great question. SO. As a reminder, lichens are (usually) and association between an ascomycete fungus and a photobiont colony made up of green algae (90% of lichens) or cyanobacteria (10% of lichens), sometimes both. There are also unicellular fungus (yeast) in there, and maybe some others, but let's focus on the fungus and the photobiont. The green algae and cyanobacteria that live inside the lichenized fungus can survive on their own, and the fact that they can be found in various habitats is what allows lichens to reproduce sexually and disperse fungal spores containing only the fungal constituent. These spores disperse far and wide, but only those that successfully form an association with a photobiont will grow and develop. The fungus CANNOT survive on its own without the photobiont. If the photobiont dies, the fungus dies. Lichen species are typically specialized to form associations with specific algae types, but some are more adaptable. Trebouxia green algae are the most common partners, and are microscopic and unicellular, so unless they are forming a thick algal mat, you won't seem them with the naked eye. But here they are under the microscope:

Aren't they adorable? Tiny little unicellular plant pals! Trentapholia is another common green alagal partner that doesn't actually look all that green. You do often see mats of these filementous algal pals growing on tree trunks, and they look like this:

source

Looks kinda like a lichen, right?

Cyanobacteria, like nostoc, can also be seen with the naked eye when they form filamentous communities like this:

source

Also kinda looks like a lichen. It's easier to form a structure when you're a filamentous microscopic organism. So why team up with a lichen at all? Well, it's first and foremost not exactly a "choice," but lichens provide added protection and structure, and make a nice home for colonies of these photobionts.

How the different organisms come together and form a composite organism is complicated, and quite frankly a bit beyond me to explain. Development and physiology is not my strong suite, but I love these sorts of asks because it forces me to research these topics more. So hey, we're all learning here! Thanks for the ask! for more info, check out What is a Lichen?

[elodieunderglass]

Hey Elodie. :) so I was reading your moss post and I had a question: you know those algae lights that they want to put everywhere? How does that work? If the CO2 goes to making biomass of a plant, how is algae so good at making O2 when there isn't a ton of it physically? I mean presumably it is pretty good at it cause afaik that's where the O2 on earth came from to begin with?

(in reference to my general grumpiness about people’s claims that moss sequesters more carbon than is physically possible)

To engage with this post, you’ll first need to know that photosynthetic organisms absorb carbon dioxide and break the molecule apart. Carbon dioxide consists of a carbon atom and two oxygen atoms. These organisms keep the carbon atom and release the two oxygen atoms. This is how plants turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. The carbon atom goes into their biomass. Right now, there is too much carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, caused by the burning of carbon, which reacts with oxygen when burned to form carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is making the atmosphere too hot. As our economies depend on burning carbon, people do not want to stop doing it. Many people are now interested in “absorbing the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere” in order to survive on the planet. The problem is, as I point out, that the atoms of carbon have to go SOMEWHERE. Carbon dioxide doesn’t just magically turn into oxygen - the C atom is still there. And when plants break CO2 down, they need to do something with the carbon - they use it to grow. The C atom goes to making the biomass of the plant. If you see a product that claims to use plants to suck enormous amounts of CO2 out of the air (I argue) you should look for the biomass that it will produce. If you can’t see where the carbon went, it’s probably not real.

Anyway! Ah! It’s a good question! but there is a ton of algae physically! And it does make biomass! Lots of it! PLANETS FULL OF IT! It’s its best trick. And it grows very quickly, too. The fact that algae still produce a huge chunk of the oxygen we use today is a big clue to the fact that there is Really Quite A Lot of It. Anyone who has ever had an aquarium can attest to how quickly algae can increase its biomass. That’s where the carbon goes! Into the biomass! That’s where the oxygen comes from! It’s discarded as a product of all that growth! There’s a huge amount of it!

I’m just going to dump this whole quote from a relevant paper here:

There are several reasons for the greater biomass yields of algae versus land plants. Generally, algae have higher photosynthetic efficiency than land plants because of greater abilities to capture light and convert it to usable chemical energy (Melis 2009, Weyer et al. 2010). Under ideal growth conditions algae direct most of their energy into cell division (6- to 12-hour cycle), allowing for rapid biomass accumulation. Also, unlike plants, unicellular algae do not partition large amounts of biomass into supportive structures such as stems and roots* that are energetically expensive to produce and often difficult to harvest and process for biofuel production. In addition, algae have carbon-concentrating mechanisms that suppress photorespiration (Spalding 2008, Jansson and Northen 2010). With algae, all the biomass can be harvested at any time of the year, rather than seasonally. In contrast, only a portion of the total biomass of terrestrial crops (corn cob, soybean seed) is harvested once a year

* this means that instead of slowly growing into a more complicated structure, like plants do, algae just doubles and doubles and doubles. FYI, moss is a plant. algae is not. algae can casually double its mass even caring, and that’s where the carbon goes: literally into LITERALLY doubling the biomass, INCREDIBLY quickly. Moss will not. Moss will grow, become more complicated, and eventually flower - all quite slowly, in comparison.

Anyway, here is a picture from the paper, showing the Biomass. you can see exactly where the carbon is going. There is so much carbon being made here, they’re literally turning it into ... oil?

Yeah... oil. Algae fuel is considered to be a reasonable replacement for fossil fuels. (starting link here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel). Algae fuel is used as reliable gimmick in science fiction, as a renewable fuel that spaceships can generate as they go - the handwaving possibilities are endless: ‘ooh, here’s a thing that takes the waste breath of human crew and makes fuel and oxygen out of it. hurray!’

So you may be like, “oh Elodie, but surely burning carbon-based fuels contributes to climate change, because it releases CO2, so uhhhh why would you bother replacing fossil fuels with a slightly fresher version of the same product?”

and I’m like “YEAH I KNOW RIGHT? the argument is that because algae removes the CO2 from the air, and burning the oil releases the same amount of CO2, it’s argued that it’s a carbon-neutral fuel. the carbon goes in, the carbon goes out. The algae puts it into the atmosphere and it takes it back out. it’s always the same carbon.”

WHICH. THE MATH CHECKS OUT, BUT I DON’T LIKE IT. The argument for developing algae fuels is that the math works out as carbon-neutral, and that it reduces reliance on the oil industry and its geopolitics, as every nation on Earth can easily grow and refine their own oil. BUT I STILL DON’T LIKE IT.

Anyway, the trick here is to look for the biomass. In the diagram above, YOU CAN SEE WHERE IT IS. The carbon goes from the carbon dioxide into the algae, where it can be made into carbon-based fuel. The carbon is THERE. it is FOUND. The peer-reviewed, heavily researched industry is so confident in the math, and the carbon, and the physical laws of photosynthesis that algae can genuinely be called a carbon-neutral fuel. The carbon has been AUDITED. the mass is KNOWN.

So what about those “algae lamps that [THEY] want to put everywhere?” I know exactly what you’re talking about. They are glowing street lamp things full of algae and they have the amazing claim of “fixing as much carbon dioxide as 200 trees.”

Those appear to be bullshit. Sorry.

However, on Tumblr, you will find a lot of posts about the algae lamps. I know. I’ve seen them. And I really wanted to believe in them! I may have even reblogged one! But then I just couldn’t find any more evidence about them. And neither could these science bloggers who tried to track down ANY ANSWERS AT ALL in 2012, https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/04/streetlight-powered-algae-actually-possible/1854/ and again in 2015. https://www.zmescience.com/science/biology/the-green-algae-street-lamps-that-suck-up-co2/

The algae were reported on in 2012 and 2013 as a funky startup invention, but apparently, only one lamp was ever made. The inventor, an utterly obscure man known as Pierre Calleja, does not appear to have a scholarly record and his scientific qualifications are a bit murky. A few scientists appeared to have asked, “Since algae grows so quickly, what will you do when they overgrow the container/ block the light?” and “Anyone who has maintained an aquarium know that removing the algae - even if you want algae! is part of maintenance; won’t these require a huge amount of maintenance?” and there was no answer. There was definitely no peer-reviewed research. The claim of “fixing as much carbon as 200 trees” (by generating equivalent biomass) cannot be backed up because all of the actual materials have disappeared from the web. The TED talk he did is gone. The startup has vanished. The website is gone. Considering that it attracted millions of dollars of investments, that’s sad news for stakeholders, but normal for a startup based on an idea easily blocked by the question, “don’t you need to clean it.”

Calleja reappeared in the news in 2017, having left the lamp startup (the article has some explanations - apparently the issue was ‘finance people’) and now he wants to make vegetarian smoked salmon out of algae. https://thefishsite.com/articles/algae-can-spearhead-a-culinary-revolution So I think it’s fair to say that the lamps didn’t work and aren’t going anywhere and have disappointed a lot of people and wasted a lot of money. However, I like his new project better. It’s obvious where the biomass is going. It’s going into the fake meat! Carry on, Pierre!

“They” are not going to put them “everywhere” because there is no secret panel of “Them” who, like, Decide Things. There was one inventor, a few reporters who talked about him, no scientific research, no marketable product was ever created, and now the creator is trying to generate fish. Just because that post has 6 bajillion notes on Tumblr doesn’t mean it’s real.

(It’s a bit awkward because two of the science communicators who reported on the lamps are friends of mine, and I know that they simply reported on it in good faith as an interesting bit of pop news, based on the now-vanished TED talk. The tumblr post in the screencap claims its source as Jess’s 2012 snippet from the Grist, which was just meant to be a cheerful description of a cool Youtube video of Pierre Calleja’s TED talk... which has now vanished from the internet entirely. She wasn’t reporting on research, just pointing out a cool video. But yeah, the ‘‘‘‘‘source’‘‘‘‘‘‘ for the Tumblr post we’ve all seen is ... literally just my friend, mentioning a cool TED talk she saw. in 2012. Which is now gone. Because the startup folded with its tail between its legs. And people are using it as a ‘source’, which I don’t think is fair!)

[darkpoisonouslove]

“The Heart’s Magic” Edition

I just posted “The Heart’s Magic” yesterday so I’ve decided to share some trivia about it. Here are some interesting facts from the entire process of the construction of this fic:

- I first had the image of the temple as the solitary thing that is on the surface of that planet. There is literally nothing else on it, just the temple. It is in pyramid shape because pyramids conduct energy and that’s exactly what its function is.

- The “details” (not that there are many of those) about the planet mostly came during the actual writing of the fic. The shape of the planet is a perfect sphere of the physical manifestation of that magic. The reason why I chose to make it silver is because I wanted it to be a bit opposing to the orange/golden of the Dragon Fire but I also wanted it to complement it, and I got a nice sun/moon duality. The Dragon fire is the sun of the whole universe - the one thing that gives it life force. And the silvery magic of that planet is sort of like a moon - they can live without magic so it isn’t vital but it makes everything so much better.

- I had so much fun constructing the defense system of the temple (although it gave me a headache and really slowed down the writing process). I considered the different stages that life goes through and the different components each of these stages include. First, we have the oxygen thing because even unicellular organisms need oxygen (granted, not all of them, but this isn’t a Biology class). Then we have blood that carries the oxygen throughout the body, sustaining its life which is what the gate of veins represents. And then we have emotions which we all associate with the heart. So basically it was oxygen >> blood >> heart/emotions.

- I had so much trouble figuring out the design of the altar chamber and how the whole process of transferring the energy into the veins worked. And in the end I left that part out since Griffin and Valtor are too preoccupied with each other to pay attention to that. I sometimes forget that when you’re writing from the PoV of a character (even if it is third person deep) you have to be careful with what that character knows and feels because it won’t be everything that you as the author know.

- At the end I decided to just have it be a dome (it’s actually a sphere but the other part is underground and that is where the heart is kept safe when it’s not creating energy) that is absolutely empty. It makes for a nice metaphor because without the love to feed it, the temple is not all that impressive and practically useless. But once it is charged with energy, the heart shows up (the last test also makes sure that it is safe for the heart to be brought to the surface, for the people who just powered it surely will not want to destroy it... right?) and reveals the true might of the temple.

- I thought that purple and orange would be their colors and the combination also looks great so I decided to have their emotions manifest in that way.

- The planets in that part of the universe look as if they are placed on the back of a dragon that is wound like a spiral with it’s head right above the pyramid so that the energy can enter his body and power all of it.

- The Ancestral Witches visited the temple a few years ago but the damage they did still lingered. It made the temple unaccessible for any other magic users that would want to try to reinvigorate it, thus depriving the entire magic system of its magic. It was a good enough solution for the moment since they couldn’t do more but they were still looking for a way to make it permanent by destroying the temple to make sure that all danger of that archaic magic being used to oppose them is eliminated. So they grabbed at the opportunity to do so when the relationship between Griffin and Valtor became serious.

- The whole thing is super ironic because they always taught Valtor to just take what he wanted without thinking about the consequences but they leaped at the chance that the selfless bond between him and Griffin provided them with. And it was also a good opportunity to test if that bond would be a threat to their plans. If Valtor hadn’t destroyed the heart and had come back empty-handed, the plans of getting rid of Griffin would’ve been kicked into motion (so Valtor might have put more thought in the completion of the mission than Griffin knew). She’s only useful when she does not pose the threat of undermining their entire plan.

- When the Ancestral Witches were there, they managed to get to the altar chamber but even the sparks that are supposed to bring forth your innermost feelings did not appear. They were not activated since Lysslis used her illusion to get through the emotional obstacle. But even if they had been activated, it wouldn’t have changed a thing since the Ancestral Witches hardly have anything similar to feelings. Still, the access to the dome allowed them to figure out how the temple worked and start devising a plan to destroy it.

Wow, already made it to 10 and I wrote a whole essay. I will leave it off here then since I more or less laid out all the details around this fic. I hope this has been a fun read on some additional info about that piece.

[arcticdementor]

Here is the acceptance speech by Travis Corcoran for 2019 Prometheus Award for Best Novel for Causes of Separation.  (Corcoran could not attend the Dublin Worldcon but wrote this acceptance speech to be read there at the ceremony.)

I would like to thank the LFS for this year’s award, but more generally, I’d like to thank them for existence of the Prometheus award, all forty years of it. It’s good that our subculture has a long-lived award to recognize excellent science fiction, especially pro-liberty science fiction.

But the Prometheus award is not merely recognition, it’s an incentive!

In fact, I might not have written my novels without the Prometheus to aim for. But the Prometheus is not a financial incentive. The one-ounce gold coin on the plaque is nice, but neither I nor any of the other winners over 40 years would ever trade or sell it, and thus – ironically – it has no financial value.

And yet the award – a recognition by a community – is a huge incentive. There’s an interesting argument here about anti-libertarian tropes like the not-so-veiled anti-semitic and anti-capitalist propaganda of socialist Star Trek’s Ferengi, the bourgeois virtues, and the non-market human flourishing that only human liberty unleashes, but that’s a rant for some other day. Thomas Aquinas said “Homo unius libri timeo” – “beware the man of one book.” The meaning has shifted – almost reversed – from “beware the man who has studied one topic intensely” to “beware the man who has only one simple view of a thing.” I concur with this advice (in both forms!). Libertarianism is absolutely correct in its magisteria (the morality of freedom vs coercion), but we need other theories to augment it when we move our sights from individual liberty and financial incentives to other topics, like culture formation – and culture subversion.

…

Every ideology and subculture likes to tell stories about how it will naturally and obviously win. Nineteenth century Protestant missionaries knew that European Protestantism was the way of the future. 20th century Marxists knew that Marxism was. In the early 21st century Wired magazine told us that “netizens” would use technology to create a brave new world. The fact that every one of them has been wrong so far should inform our Bayesian priors. Perhaps cryptography, bitcoin, and the internet aren’t going to create a libertarian future. Perhaps the future looks a lot more like Orwell’s boot stomping on a face, forever.

Why might this be, and – if it does – how might we respond to it?

Last year I spoke about the essay “Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution” by David Chapman, which argues that new subcultures are pioneered by geeks, appreciated by members of the public, and taken over by sociopaths. His thesis is a particular example of a more general case.

There’s also Pournelle’s – yes, that Pournelle – iron law of bureaucracy” which states “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”

Robert Conquest’s third law expresses something similar: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”

Chapman’s essay and Pournelle’s and Conquest’s laws are three observations of a single underlying phenomena: the collectivists always worm their way in and take over. We know THAT this happens, but WHY does it happen? How can we model it and understand it?

…

My theory, which unites Chapman’s “Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths”, Pournelle’s Iron Law, and Conquest’s Third Law is this: organisms, whether they’re unicellular, multicellular, or purely information, like Dawkin’s memes, egregores, and ideologies, mutate, evolve, and are selected for. Those that are best at surviving and reproducing soon dominate the population…and one of the best ways to survive is secure energy resources by hunting, killing, and eating (or, more gently, parasitizing) organisms that do the hard work of harvesting energy and building structures.

David Hines has a great essay at the status451.com blog titled “Days of Rage” where he discusses the surge in left-wing organizing and terrorism in the US in the 1970s. One thing that Hines points out again and again is that collectivists plan, they train, and they invade. I note that their organizations also exchange members and ideas (mate) and fission (reproduce). We are looking not just at a parasite, but at a class of parasite, forged and refined in the Darwinian furnace.

Evolution is a harsh mistress.

…

Predation and parasitism are selected for in the biosphere because they are efficient. They’re selected for in the realm of human culture for the same reason. It’s easier to harvest energy from a parasitized host species than it is to grow leaves, and it’s easier to take over a subculture than it is to create one. Thus science fiction will always suffer wave after wave of entryists, trying to claim the subculture for themselves. And, like Orwell’s Big Brother, they will rewrite history to declare that they invented it. “Let me join your club. You have to change now that I’m here. You have to leave now. We all agree that I made this, decades ago.” We see that all entrusts do this (“The United States was always about social justice ; the Jewish faith was always about social justice ; this TV station and car line and toothpaste were always about social justice”) and we conclude that they do because it is the optimal strategy, tested and chosen by evolution.

So, is that it? Are we doomed to lose all battles, to be preyed upon and parasitized?

In the biosphere, only a minority of organisms are predators or parasites. How could it be otherwise? Someone still needs to do the hard work of capturing solar energy and building biological matter. So too in the world of human culture. Tax-thieving governments and culture-thieving brigands can’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg. The Lotka-Volterra equations, first developed in 1910 to describe chemical reactions, but echoing Pierre-François Verhulst’s logistic equation from almost a century earlier quantified the mechanism.

And, since biology is economics is sociology, I note that Mancur Lloyd Olson Jr.’s theory of roving bandits, which are willing to loot everything from a village, and stationary bandits, who learn to restrain themselves so as to keep the village alive, and capable of being pillaged (or “taxed”) again reaches the same conclusion: predators can never outpopulate the prey … at least not for long.

Based on Lotka, Volterra, and Olson, then, I suggest that the collectivists’ social entryism will never be total. Negative feedback loops will ensure that. When will the entryist wave peak? Perhaps it already has. The last decade saw the cultures of video games and comics under attack from entryists, but perhaps the high water mark has already been reached, as we’ve seen several horrific market failure, such as the female Ghostbusters fiasco, Mass Effect: Andromeda, or that time when Zoe Quinn of comicsgate / Five Guys fame was given a DC Comics title. As the Twitter meme says “get woke, go broke”.

But on the other hand, perhaps not. Strauss–Howe generations theory, which I tentatively give the nod to, suggests that we’re going to be deep in the suck for quite a while yet.

…

What strategies can we use to improve our odds, to make life somewhat more tolerable in a world where Darwinianism means that threats are ever present?

Look to biology.

We can evolve physical defenses, we can evolve camouflage, or we can adapt to new environments that are less conducive to predators.

What do these mean in social terms?

Physical defenses means organizations building mechanisms to keep entryists out – a topic on which I am not an expert…and Pournelle’s Law and Conquest’s Third Law suggest that perhaps no one is.

The social equivalent of camouflage is a mixture of esotericism (in dangerous times people speak in code) and foot-dragging Vichy coexistence. Scott Aaronson and Slate Star Codex wrote essays on “Kolmogorov complicity” (a good pun on Kolmogorov complexity), and I urge you to read them.

My favorite, is the third option: moving to where the predators aren’t. Which – surprise – boils down to my old favorite, exit.

Jame C Scott talks about exit extensively in his book “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia” and in his later book “Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States”. He makes the core point that when you see a populace that does not have certain social technologies, that does not mean – contra the default narrative – that they never evolved them. Sometimes populations intentionally abandon technologies because those techniques make them legibile to control and subversion by the overculture. If you want to avoid computer viruses, rip the computers out of your Battlestar. If you want to avoid land taxes, burn down the land registry, or become nomadic. If you want to avoid having your subculture taken over by collectivists … what, exactly?

[dimitrie-vatler-blog]

When does, is something considered Living?

When do we consider something or in this case someone, alive or dead? Like what is the criteria?

But is that is all? Like there are organism we cannot see with our naked eyes, how do we rest our ears on them? Unless they are residing their colonies on our ears though...

I know, I know the failure of a heartbeat when you rest your ear against the chest or brush of exhales on your two fingers.

So, What is life?

But speaking on a scientific term, the debate of whether something is living or dead is still a hot topic! And yes we love spices and chilly unless the next morning, though.

"Life can be defined as a unique aggregation of molecules that can express themselves through various chemical reactions."

We'll leave the first question for some other day but for let's just focus on what exactly is living?

Okay so now we have a somewhat structured definition of life that keep changes over overs and this not might be the last one. But from here two question arises - What is the purpose of life and secondly - What is living?

Reproduction! The obviously first one to pop up, right? But also the ability to sense the environment and mount a suitable response to it. Growth can also be added to the uniqueness of life. Metabolism and Cellular organisation can also be added to this list. Does all of these mentioned above are unique to the life itself? Aren't these features possessed by non-living organisms?

Let's jump to each and every point and try to compare it with non-living ones. I swear it won't bore you.

When we defined something as - Living - we look for distinct characters exhibited by them. What are some characteristics you can imagine a living organism might possess?

Reproduction in multicellular organisms like us is the production of progeny more or less similar to parents but in a unicellular organism like amoeba it is simply increasing in number which kinda makes reproduction in unicellular organism equivalent to growth but we'll get there in a second.

So, now we know reproduction is so unique that it isn't possessed by non-living objects like a car. Imagine your car parked with another car and after an hour or so you saw a little cycle in between them. That actually is possible though but I hope you understood what I meant.

1. Reproduction - Organisms reproduce in order to continue their species. Reproduction can have many definitions for different organisms and different tongues. It can be simply called as the production of new individuals or progeny. Production though sounds a bit machinery but hey it works! It can be called as the formation of new similar individuals either by Asexual or Sexual mode. Reproduction is essential for the continuity of life on earth.

There are many organisms that do not reproduce. Scary as it sounds, but it's not all about the enjoyment you know.

Organisms like a worker bee don't reproduce. A sterile human or mules or liger cannot reproduce either which makes reproduction as not so unique as it might sound.

2. Growth - Living organism grow over time and some overnight like your belly that just came out. "Growth is the increase in mass and number of individuals" - (And that's why reproduction was equivalent to growth in living organism cause it's simply increasing in number). We grow by continuous division in our cells but only up to a certain age whereas plants so continuously throughout their lifespan. But non- living objects grow too. Remember growth is increase in mass, we cannot shift our criteria for expectations you know. They grow by the accumulation of materials on the surface. Mountains, boulders and sand mounds do grow. In a living organism, the growth is from inside. Okay, so that's two down.

So, reproduction should be a unique characteristic possessed by a living organism, right? Wrong!

Chemical reactions can be demonstrated outside a cell-free system too but they are surely not living but they can surely be living reactions that also take place inside our bodies.

The above three features are rewarded with no exceptions and hence are considered to be Defining features. But there is more to life as we learn more and more about DNA. What might be a Plant today could be a bacteria tomorrow. Just wait for all it to happen.

Aside from the above-mentioned ones, one can also include - Respiration, excretion, movement, Homeostasis, Adaptations, Ageing and Death, Lifespan, Nutrition, Shape And Size etc.

3. Metabolism - You might have heard this term somewhere, but can't remember where? Maybe in your textbooks or the fruits section in the supermarket. "Metabolism is the sum of all the chemical reactions taking place in your body". And basically, there are two types of reactions placed under metabolism - Catabolism and Anabolism.

Keep Researching Young Scientist!

So, metabolism is without exception a defining feature of living beings but it isn't alone.

4. Consciousness - You are conscious of your environment but certainly not the bed you sleep on every day or the plastic bottle you just threw in the trash bin or we hope so. Consciousness is very well a defining feature to all life forms. From single-celled to the most complex of all, we all mount a suitable response to our environment and stimuli. Plants also sense environment like temperature, water, pollution and etc.

5. Cellular organism - Yet another feature to define living beings. Every organism is composed of either one or trillions of cells.

#teamtree #nature #life #living #planet #earth #lifespan #animal #tree #bacteria #alive

[asoni-and-alex]

Asoni, how many biological henders are there in your species? And what are the differences between them? I'm pretty curious about the biology of your species! I wanna know if it's similar or different from life on Earth. Biologically, we have two genders, male and female. (Yes, people like to identify as different, but I'm just talking scientifically.) Some species, usually bacteria or other unicellular organisms dont exactly have genders though. They don't need one! Also, what species are you?

Great question. Certainly one that I had. Before I let Asoni take it from here though, I do know (and maybe it’s cause I went to a science and tech school) that there are more than two biological sexes present in human beings. And a quick reminder (not trying to be argumentative) sex does NOT equal gender. Ok, take it away buddy!

Alright, well aside from our obvious size difference, we have differences in skin, hair, and other general physical attributes. Some physical differences have been mentioned before. We don’t really have a binary concept of gender like humans do. And we have more than two obvious sexes. Because of that we don’t really have a male/female dynamic in terms of procreating. Certain people can carry children, others cannot. An easy way to tell sex in our species is the number of eyes we have.

two eyes: common, about 75% of the population. They can carry children.

four eyes: less common, about 20% of the population. They cannot carry children.

one eye or three eyes: rare, about 5% of the population. They can sometimes carry children. 

five eyes: no one but the king has five eyes. The king can carry children. 

We do not have positions based on sex or gender identity, except for the king, though most nobles tend to be in the smaller sets of the population, though that is not always the case. People have been known to change sexes through surgery. 

Hope this is what you were looking for! I’m trying to keep this blog as sfw as possible, so I’m going to keep all questions pertaining to sex and gender above the belt, alright? 

kofi | patreon

[acarnivalofstars]

Ensemble Stars Scout Translation: Eccentric “Year-End Party with Old Friends” Part 3

Can you imagine an app game where you play as Natsume trying to serve up food and drinks for the rest of the Oddballs that would be so cute--

Special thanks to Dreamy for helping me proofread! We’re also working together to translate Magical Halloween so stay tuned for updates! (As for when idk orz)

All the Oddballs gather together at the cafe for a nice conversation and Shu orders croissants as expected.

Kanata: *slurp, slurp*......🎵

It’s delicious~ Aah, I feel revived…...🎵

Rei: That`s splendid. Shinkai-kun comes closer to death and is revived much more than my undead self, it seems.

Do take care of your body more. It has become chilly as of late.

Wataru: It is a coldness only winter can provide, isn’t it! Amazing…...☆

Kanata: Wataru~ That’s not funny. It’s cold. I got a “chill” just now.

Wataru: Eh? That has the same meaning as “go die” to me as well, you know?!

Shu: Even if you scold him it can’t be helped, Rei. Kanata never listens to what others tell him after all.

Rei: Nay, if it is the current Shinkai-kun then he can understand even a small sum of human language I am sure.

That is what I would like to believe. He will not remain an arrogant monster who does not know right from wrong in this world forever.

Wataru: Who can say? Kanata has been the most otherworldly one among us all both in the past and even now, yes?

Kanata: That would be you, “Wataru”~. I am “normal”......🎵

Rei: Just what exactly is “normal,” I wonder…...Sakasaki-ku~n, give me a refill of coffee as well. Coffee as sweet as blood and as black as night, if you would 🎵

Natsume: Blood is not SWEET. And besides, I’m not a waiTER. I will not wait on you, OKAY?

Well, whatEVER…...The owner had some business he couldn’t put off so he LEFT, and he did ask me to watch the place during that TIME.

This isn’t my job THOUGH, so don’t hold any expectations for the flaVOR.

Little Kitten, will you lend me a HAND? My older brothers* don’t know how to hold BACK so they eat and drink much more than expected despite how they LOOK 🎵. (T/N: Keep in mind that Natsume isn’t referring to the Oddballs as his biological brothers--it’s common in Japan to call people older than you that you’re close to as “older brother” or “older sister.”)

Shu: Unlike my colleagues, I only partake in what is necessary. …...Are there no croissants, boy?

Rei: Yes. It is an appropriate time for both gods and the new moon to doze off, so croissants are suitable.

People’s preferences sure are a mystery. I feel that food can’t be eaten cleanly.

And yet Itsuki-kun, did you not choose only what was beautiful to put in your mouth?

Shu: Do you have a problem with that? I wish to only take beautiful things into my body. It is for that reason humans have aesthetic sense.

Even unicellular organisms possess the basic neural circuits to see through beauty or ugliness.

To forget that and inadvertently take in food right before your eyes is a shameful degeneracy.

Kanata: Ufufu. I am “satisfied” with just “water”~

Nacchan, will you give me some “ice water”? My “skin” is still chilly, so I’d like some “moisture”~🎵

Natsume: I don’t MIND, but make sure to drink the ice water normaLLY. Don’t splash it all over your BODY. Cleaning up would be a pain after ALL. …...Wataru-nii-san, what will you ORDER?

Wataru: Fufufu. From this lineup it seems that everyone else will be fooling around so I am in a good mood.

For now I will have some black tea and…...one dish each that Natsume-kun wishes to serve us from his menu, if you please 🎵

Natsume: So you’re putting all the decisions on me I SEE. What a grave responsibiliTY.

Wait for just a bit, OKAY. I’ll go prepare it right NOW…...If you’ll excuse me now 🎵

Kanata: Nacchan, why not “stay with us” instead of working? You are soometimes “reserved,” aren’t you……?

Shu: He is the only junior among us after all. Joining a flock of upperclassmen all by himself requires quite a bit of courage, I’m sure.

It is much like how Rei excessively puts on airs of being someone older and acts grand.

Rei: Uwah, sparks were flying this way. Itsuki-kun just does not understand the feeling of spending one’s youth alongside your juniors after being held back~

It is in its own way a method of paying attention to the needs of others, you see~......?

Though I am particularly worried about Shinkai-kun and Itsuki-kun, it is also best if everyone else move up a grade as well.

It leaves things half-done and causes trouble for others after all. Well, what comes around, goes around.

Anyhow. This can only be considered an uncanny relationship formed through a turn of fate. To think that we would all be gathered here on this eventless day.

Whether it is God`s playfulness or a trick of the Devil, either way it is a rather interesting development 🎵

Shu: It is a mere coincidence, I’m sure. Rei and the boy happened to encounter each other at the same cafe by chance. After Wataru and I took a tour of the museum together, and by chance...we picked up Kanata on the road home.

Then, in order for him to drink in moisture and warmth, we happened to enter this cafe by chance…resulting in our gathering here.

As long as we affiliated with Yumenosaki Academy, the scope of our activities is bound to overlap.

To have this many coincidences repeat one after the other is not an impossible feat according to the theory of probability. Rei’s manner of speaking that overemphasizes romantic ideals can be disgusting at times.

Wataru: Fufufu. That is a shared loveable vice shared among us “Five Oddballs,” surely.

Kanata: Yes. It felt as if we were in a “play” for a loooong time “last year” after all.

Rei: Yes, last year was…...This year, it seems each of our lives changed completely.

Let us talk about that, my old friends whom I happen to come across occasionally.

It happens to be the season where many popular customs like year-end parties flourish. Though it may be a heavy topic for a chat over tea...let us reflect on the year for each of us.

Sakasaki-kun, once you are done preparing the drinks and such, come over here as well.

Since this is a rare occasion you should likewise sit alongside us, young lady. Let us put aside rank, forget about our ties of obligation to this world, and make merry.

A strange one-act such as this is seldom seen after all 🎵

[the-gayest-dragon]

Question Time!

I was tagged by @paganlesbean thanks! Always post these rules! Answer the questions given by the person who tagged you. Write 11 questions of your own. Tag 11 people.

Answers 1) Favorite band? At the moment, probably Mumford and Sons. 2) Do you believe in miracles? Not really. Although, the fact that evolution began from unicellular organisms and, well, evolved into us and everything on this planet is pretty fucking miraculous imo. 3) What’s the best place to sit and think? In bed I suppose, although I’m not usually sitting in there. If I can get very specific, I’d say places that weren’t originally made to sit on, but look like they were, more exactly natural things, like chair-shaped trees or rocks. 4) Last song you listened to? “In This World Or The One Below” from the Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag OST, by Bryan Tyler 5) Do you know any foreign languages? Well yes, my first language is french and I am fluent in english. I can also speak some basic german. On a related note, I can also speak and write a bit of the dragon language from Skyrim. 666) Would you make out with Mothman behind the 7-eleven down the street? Nope. I like moths, but far, FAR away, where they can NOT toUCh ME. 7) If you could write a note to your younger self, what would you say in only two words? Keep drawing (or “dessine toujours” (always draw), if it was for very-young-me, since I began learning english when I was 13). 8) In one sentence what is your biggest concern right now? I need to get a SHITTON of schoolwork done in only two days and I am not even halfway through Mass Effect: Andromeda. 9) How gay are you? Even gayer than I am anxious, and that’s saying a lot. 10) Last Airbender or Legend of Korra? I sincerely love both, but Last Airbender was objectively better written and constructed. I still adore all the lore about the first Avatar from Legend of Korra and I had the dorkiest crush on Amon because dudes with masks are my weakness. 11) Your aesthetic in four words? dragons, weed, gaming, pencils (I kinda threw this together randomly, I never ask myself this tbh… I am an untidy blob with an unclear aesthetic that’s composed of so many incompatible things that it can’t be precisely defined).

Questions 1) Are you a rogue, warrior, paladin, necromancer, …?  2) Your favorite piece of clothing/ensemble? Optional: why is it your favorite? 3) A movie/game/tv show soundtrack that makes you shiver? 420) Weed, alcohol, other, nothing? What’s your thing? 5) Who do you love most right now? 6) What’s the unhealthiest thing you love eating? 7) Favorite and most hated textures? 8) Who’s a good boy? 9) You somehow end up trapped in the last video game you played (or the last movie you watched, if games aren’t your thing). How long do you survive? 10) Cat or dog person? Or maybe lizard? Some people like horses too, so… which is yours? 11) A song you remember from your childhood. Any type of song.

@younhide @softgrungeknight @pinchitosmcpupas @aurawolfiewind @rider-phantomhive @cathatt @boyfluxbuck @lunardragongoddess @x0fuckboy0x @tzren @sahloknirs

To all the others who see this and think it would be cool to do, you can say I tagged you.

[asfeedin]

Why celebrate Earth Day? Here’s 12 reasons why.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, Live Science asked a dozen scientists to share their favorite facts about our home planet. These researchers marveled at everything from backward flowing rivers in Antarctica to the Giant Crystal Cave of Naica in Mexico, which one geologist called the “Sistine Chapel of crystals.”

Read on to learn about Earth’s wonders. If you’ve got one of your own to share, write about it in the comments below.

1. Mountainous changes

The stunning view of Mount Everest from the Gokyo Valley. (Image credit: Shutterstock)

“The top of Mount Everest is limestone from an ancient ocean floor formed 470 million years ago — before life had even left the ocean! I love this fact, because it reminds us of the tremendous changes our Earth has gone through to bring us to this moment in time, from mass extinctions to asteroid impacts and vast movements of the very ground we stand on. Just as humans are one small speck in a vast universe (thanks, Carl Sagan!), so too are we a tiny blip of time in the long arc of Earth’s history,” said Jacquelyn Gill, an associate professor in the School of Biology and Ecology and the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine.

That fact can be sobering, but it provides a message of hope for our species as well. 

“When we lose species because of our actions, we’re cutting threads in a tapestry that has taken billions of years to weave, and it records stories of vulnerability and loss, but of survival and resilience, too.”

So while our planet’s past may provide warnings of upheavals, it can also provide hints for charting the future.

“The clues to surviving global change are in the rocks, for those who can read them,” Gill said.

2. Giant Crystals of Naica

A man (left) explores the Giant Crystal Cave of Naica in Mexico. (Image credit: Javier Trueba)

Juan Manuel García-Ruiz, a geologist at the Spanish National Research Council, has spent a good portion of his career crawling into underground vaults of pure crystal. Last year, García-Ruiz authored a paper on the history of the largest geode on Earth — a jagged, crystal chamber in a Spanish mine that can comfortably fit several scientists inside at once. But his favorite spot on Earth is where the Giant Crystal Cave of Naica lays buried, about 1,000 feet (300 meters) below the town of Naica, Mexico.

“This is the ‘Sistine Chapel of crystals,'” García-Ruiz told Live Science. Giant gypsum pillars, most of which are as large and thick as telephone poles, slash through the basketball-court-size cavern in a brilliant display of Earth’s slow-motion alchemy. The crystals are hundreds of thousands of years old, and still actively growing in the hot, humid cave. For now, the largest one measures 39 feet (12 m) in length and 13 feet (4 m) in diameter, and it weighs 55 tons (50 metric tons).

3. Earth’s mysterious synergy

An illustration of Earth’s mysterious innards (Image credit: Ed Garnero/ASU)

“My favorite fact about Earth is that all parts of it, from the center to the atmosphere, appear to be dynamically and chemically interactive, over a wide range of time scales and spatial scales,” Ed Garnero, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, told Live Science.

As an example of this planet-wide synchronicity, Garnero sent an image (which he made) depicting the mysterious underground structures that some researchers have labeled “the blobs.” These lopsided, continent-sized mountains sit inside Earth’s mantle about halfway between your feet and the center of the planet. While scientists know from seismic imaging that these blobs exist, nobody is exactly sure what they are or what they do.

One intriguing feature of the structures, Garnero said, is that plumes of exceptionally hot rock (depicted here in yellow) appear to rise off the blobs and feed certain volcanoes on the surface — essentially creating a chemical pipeline that connects the deep Earth to the high atmosphere.

“I guess an addendum to this fact is that there is SO MUCH that we do not know about Earth — from the internal structures to the climate,” Garnero said. “It is an exciting time to monitor, measure and model the observations.”

4. “Stained glass” diatoms

A wagon wheel diatom under a microscope (Image credit: NOAA/John R. Dolan, Laboratoire d’Océanographie de Villefranche; Observatoire Océanologique de Villefrance-sur-Mer)

One of the most amazing facts about Earth is that “around 20-50% of the Earth’s oxygen is produced by diatoms,” said Sarah Webb, a biologist and associate professor of life science at Arkansas State University-Newport. 

“Diatoms are microscopic algae with a shell made of glass,” Webb told Live Science in an email. Diatoms are pretty to look at, too, she said. “They look like stained glass when viewed under a microscope.” 

Life as we know it wouldn’t be around were it not for an abundance of lung-friendly oxygen gas in our atmosphere. Earth has been oxygenated for about 2.3 billion to 2.4 billion years, but the tiny, delicate diatoms of today likely evolved around 250 million years ago. These unicellular organisms are ubiquitous in Earth’s oceans, and scientists estimate that there are more than 100,000 species of diatoms. 

5. Rivers that flow backward

Robin Bell smiles for the camera in Antarctica, where she does most of her research. (Image credit: Courtesy of Robin Bell)

Antarctica, Earth’s southernmost continent, is one of the driest places on the planet. But there’s a surprising amount of liquid water lurking below the continent’s frozen surface that doesn’t behave as you might expect.

“Beneath the ice in Antarctica there are mountain ranges where rivers flow backward and lakes [that are] the size of New Jersey,” said Robin Bell, president of the American Geophysical Union and a professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in Palisades, New York.

“The weight of the overlying ice makes the water flow backward while the heat of the Earth keeps the water in the subglacial rivers and lakes from turning into ice,” Bell said.

Scientists discovered clues to a backward-flowing river in Antarctica’s Gamburtsev Mountains after they examined the shape of the icy layer atop the hidden river; that layer aligned with the direction of the water’s movement.

6. Glowing sea creatures

The fluorescent seahorse, Hippocampus erectus, glows a bold red and green. (Image credit: Copyright David Gruber)

More than 70% of Earth is covered with water, so it’s no surprise that scientists such as David Gruber find inspiration in exploring these great depths. Gruber, a presidential professor of biology at City University of New York and an explorer with the National Geographic Society, studies glowing marine animals. He snapped the above photo, which shows the first biofluorescent seahorse known to science.

“Knowing how much magic is happening beneath the sea that we’ve yet to even learn about yet,” is Gruber’s favorite Earth fact. “It’s perhaps my main inspiration as a scientist that maintains my child-like curiosity.”

There’s so much to learn. “How we are connected to other life and what our place is on this amazing planet is still in its early stages,” Gruber told Live Science.

7. Route 66

(Image credit: vectortatu/Shutterstock)

“The boundary between Earth’s mantle and core is roughly 3,000 km [about 1,865 miles] below our feet, a little less than the total length of America’s ‘Mother Road,’ Route 66,” said Jennifer Jackson, a professor of Mineral Physics at Caltech.

Initially, researchers thought that this region was a simple interface between solid rocks and liquid iron-rich metal. But, in reality, “this remote region is almost as complex as Earth’s surface,” she said. 

While it’s impossible to reach this Route-66-long place in person, “geophysical and experimental studies of this distant region reveal a fascinating landscape of chemical and structural complexity that influences what’s happening on Earth’s surface,” Jackson said. “For example, the complex dynamics of Earth’s core-mantle boundary affects Earth’s protective geomagnetic field and the motion of tectonic plates.”

8. Life on our planet

Cambrian fossils formed by cyanobacteria are found in Newfoundland, Canada. (Image credit: Shutterstock)

Our planet harbors magnificent life-forms, from tiny, near-invisible organisms to giant, ferocious beasts. Billions of years ago, conditions became just right for the tiniest particles to combine together and form the very first life-forms. 

These life-forms are nearly as ancient as Earth itself. “The Earth is over 4.6 billion years [old], and life has been present on the Earth continuously since at least 3.5 billion years ago,” Shuhai Xiao, professor of geobiology in the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech. The earliest evidence for life on our planet comes from the marks these organisms left on rocks, according to a previous Live Science report.

Photosynthetic organisms called cyanobacteria were some of the earliest life-forms on our planet. Here is a photo of fossilized Cambrian mounds formed by cyanobacteria in Newfoundland, Canada.

9. Climate feedback

It’s not too hot or too cold for this moose in Washington’s temperate rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula. (Image credit: Shutterstock)

Another amazing feature of our planet is how various processes interact in so-called climate feedbacks, which act to either amplify or diminish other climate forces. 

“It’s amazing how climate feedbacks have maintained a habitable planetary climate for hundreds of millions of years —- right in the sweet spot of not too cold, not too warm,” said Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. 

However, these same feedbacks could make the effects of climate change worse, because they may further amplify the planet’s already increasing temperatures, resulting in what is known as “positive feedback,” according to NASA. For instance, as the globe warms, it causes more sea ice to melt; ice reflects a lot of sunlight, sending heat back out to space; but when that ice melts, it reveals a dark sea surface that instead absorbs heat.

“We need to fight climate change harder, to keep our planet habitable and flourishing,” Overpeck said. “That’s what we all need to rededicate ourselves to on this 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day.”

10. The past influences the future

(Image credit: Merritt Turetsky)

An amazing fact is that “historical legacies often dictate how Earth will respond to modern change,” said Merritt Turetsky, the director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder. 

“A legacy can be thought of as [a] memory of an ecosystem with regard to past events,” Turetsky said. “One example is permafrost, frozen soils that have accumulated at high latitudes over millennia. Today, permafrost soils store so much carbon — derived from ancient plants, animals and microbes that existed on the surface of our planet — that they will be a major player in how Earth responds to future climate change.”

“The past often is the key to understanding our planet’s future,” Turetsky told Live Science.

Caption: Merritt Turetsky’s team samples frozen permafrost soils in Alaska and Canada to understand how past soil types influence the ability of Arctic ecosystems to cope with modern environmental change.

11. Fascinating dimensions

(Image credit: Johann Philipp Klages)

Our planet is a dynamic and ever-evolving giant orb, with earthquakes shifting the rocky plates that make up its surface, volcanoes that exude fiery lava from the planet’s innards, and even deep-sea hydrothermal vents that gurgle out sizzling mineral water that supports bizarre forms of life. All of this can be enchanting to scientists who immerse themselves in the planet’s geology.

Glacial geologist Johann Philipp Klages said his favorite aspects of Earth are “its fascinating dimensions and unexpected forces, which pleasantly tell us, again and again, how small and insignificant we are in the context of Earth’s history.” 

Klages is a research scientist in the Marine Geology section of the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany. An expedition on the institution’s icebreaker RV Polarstern took Klages to the Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica in 2017, where he captured this gorgeous image of the ship in front of the Pine Island ice shelf edge.

12. Natural healing

This mother and baby tapir might just help the Amazon rainforest.  (Image credit: Shutterstock)

What is Earth’s greatest feature? That “it supports life!” Marcia Macedo, an associate scientist and director of the Water Program at Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) in Massachusetts, told Live Science.

“What amazes me is that most natural systems have the capacity to heal themselves after big disturbances,” she said. “This is as true for a human body recovering from disease as it is for a tropical forest growing back after an intense fire.”

Macedo added, “sometimes that healing is facilitated by surprising heroes,” such as the tapir, which can restore degraded forests in the Amazon. The tapir does this by munching on fruit from healthy trees and then depositing their seeds in areas that have been previously burned, according to a WHRC statement.

Originally published on Live Science. 

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Tags: 12, Celebrate, day, Earth, Heres, Reasons

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otherworldly conversations, terran topics, local terms; Donna J. Haraway; en Material feminisms / © 2008 by Indiana University Press

We must find another relationship to nature besides reification, possession, appropriation, and nostalgia.

Following Ursula LeGuin, and inspired by some of the chapters in the evolutionary tales of woman-the-gatherer, I want to engage in a carrier-bag practice of storytelling, in which the stories do not reveal secrets acquired by heroes pursuing luminous objects across and through the plot matrix of the world. Bag-lady storytelling would instead proceed by putting unexpected partners and irreducible details into a frayed, porous carrier bag. Encouraging halting conversations, the encounter transmutes and reconstitutes all the partners and all the details. The stories do not have beginnings or ends; they have continuations, interruptions, and reformulations—just the kind of survivable stories we could use these days. And perhaps my beginning with the transmogrification of LeGuin’s “Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction” (1989) to the bag-lady practice of storytelling can remind us that the lurking dilemma in all of these tales is comprehensive homelessness, the lack of a common place, and the devastation of public culture. 

A few years ago I was visiting my high-school friend, who lived with her husband and three sons, aged sixteen, fourteen, and eleven, near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Periodically throughout the weekend, the two older boys teased each other mercilessly about a high-school dance that was coming up; each boy tried to get under his brother’s skin by queer-baiting him relentlessly. In this middle-class, white, American community, their patent nervousness about dating girls was enacted in “playful” insults about each other’s not-yet-fully-consolidated gender allegiances and identities. In confused, but numbingly common moves, they accused each other of being simultaneously a girl and a queer. From my point of view, they were performing a required lesson in the compulsory heterosexuality of my culture and theirs.

In her discussion of the language games of training, Vicki Hearne invoked Wittgenstein’s injunction that “to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life” (1986, 4). A professional trainer and an incurable intellectual, Hearne was looking for a philosophically responsible language for talking about the stories inhabited by trainers and companion animals like dogs and horses. She was convinced that the training relationship is a moral one that requires the personhood of all the partners. But, although Hearne did not affirm this point, the moral relationship cannot rely on a shared anthropomorphic personhood. Only some of the partners are people, and the form of life the conversants construct is neither purely canine nor purely human. Furthermore, personhood is only one local, albeit historically broadly important, way of being a subject. And, like most moral relationships, this one cannot rely on ignorance of radical heterogeneity in the commitment to equalityas-sameness.

So our “common context” is not theism—the relations of a creator God to his product—but constructivism and productionism. Constructivism and productionism are the consequences of the material relocation of the narratives and practices of creation and their ensuing legal relations onto “man” and “nature” in (how else can I say it?) white capitalist heterosexist patriarchy (hereafter WCHP, an acronym whose beauty fits its referent). The nineteenth-century debate about the demarcation between God’s creative action and nature’s laws, and so between man and nature, mind and body, was resolved by a commitment to the principle of the uniformity of nature and scientific naturalism. In the context of the founding law of the Father, nature’s capacities and nature’s laws were identical. Narratively, this identification entails the escalating dominations built into stories of the endless transgressions of forbidden boundaries—the erotic frisson of man’s projects of transcendence, prominently including techno-science. “Science did not replace God: God became identified with the laws of nature” (1985, 240)

In Lukacs’s and Young’s story in the 1970s, nature could only be matrix or product, while man had to be the sole agent, exactly the masculinist structure of the human story, including the versions that narrate both the planting and the harvest of Darwinism.

I think we must engage in forms of life with nonhumans—both machines and organisms—on livelier terms than those provided by harvesting Darwinism or Marxism. Refiguring conversations with those who are not “us” must be part of that project. We have to strike up a coherent conversation where humans are not the measure of all things and where no one claims unmediated access to anyone else. Humans, at least, need a different kind of theory of mediations.

Noske is consumed by the scandal of the particular kind of object status of animals enforced in the Western histories and cultures she discusses. In Marxist formulations, reification refers to the re-presentation to human laborers of the product of their labor—that is, of the means through which they make themselves historically—in a particular, hostile form. In capitalist relations of production, the human activity embodied in the product of labor is frozen, appropriated, and made to reappear as It, the commodity form that dominates and distorts social life. In that frame, reification is not a problem for domestic animals, but, for example, for tenant farmers, who objectify their labor in the products of animal husbandry and then have the fruit of that labor appropriated by another, who represents it to the worker in a commodity form. But more fundamentally, the farmer is represented to himself in the commodity form. The paradigmatic reification within a Marxist analysis is of the worker himself, whose own life-making activity, his labor power, is taken from him and represented in a coercive commodity form. He becomes It.

Animals are not part of the social relationship at all; they never have any status but that of not-human; not subject, therefore object.

But no matter how recast, this human family drama is not the process of re-establishing the terms of relationality that concerns animals. The last thing they “need” is human subject status, in whatever culturalhistorical form. That is the problem with much animal rights discourse. The best animals could get out of that approach is the “right” to be permanently represented, as lesser humans, in human discourse, such as the law—animals would get the right to be permanently “orientalized.” As Marx put it in another context and for other beings, “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” Lots of well-intentioned, but finally imperialist ecological discourse takes that shape. Its tones resonate with the pro-life/anti-abortion question, “Who speaks for the fetus?” The answer is, anybody but the pregnant woman, especially if that anybody is a legal, medical, or scientific expert. Or a father. Facing the harvest of Darwinism, we do not need an endless discourse on who speaks for animals, or for nature in general. We have had enough of the language games of fatherhood. 

 The point is not new representations but new practices, other forms of life rejoining humans and not-humans

However, animals are not lesser humans; they are other worlds, whose otherworldliness must not be disenchanted and cut to our size, but must be respected for what it is” (1989, xi; my punctuation). Great, but how? And how especially if there is no outside of language games?

Nature is a technology, and that is a very particular sort of embodied social category.

At the very least, it must be admitted that “animal exploitation cannot be tolerated without damaging the principle of inter-subjectivity” (1989, 38). Here we are getting to the heart of the matter. What is inter-subjectivity between radically different kinds of subjects? The word subject is cumbersome, but so are all the alternatives, such as agent, partner, or person. How do we designate radical otherness at the heart of ethical relating? That problem is more than a human one; as we will see, it is intrinsic to the story of life on earth. 

A promising form of life, conversation defies the autonomization of the self as well as the objectification of the other.

With the elapse of time, the internal enemies of the prey evolved into microbial guests, and, finally, supportive adopted relatives. Because of a wealth of molecular biological and biochemical evidence supporting these models, the mitochondria of today are best seen as descendents of cells that evolved within other cells. (Margulis and Sagan 1986, 71)

The story of heterogeneous associations at various levels of integration repeated itself many times at many scales. Clones of eukaryotic cells in the form of animals, plants, fungi, and protoctists seem to share a symbiotic history . . . From an evolutionary point of view, the first eukaryotes were loose confederacies of bacteria that, with continuing integration, became recognizable as protists, unicellular eukaryotic cells . . . The earliest protists were likely to have been most like bacterial communities . . . At first each autopoietic [selfmaintaining] community member replicated its DNA, divided, and remained in contact with other members in a fairly informal manner. Informal here refers to the number of partners in these confederacies: they varied. (Margolis and Sagan 1986, 72)

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DNA. A look at the Genetic Code

Deoxyribonucleic Acid, or DNA is the hereditary material in human beings as well as almost all other organisms. 

Cambridge University researchers James Watson and Francis Crick made a surprising discovery about the human genetic code when they found that the structure of the DNA molecule shops details in the form of a four-character digital code just like in a composed language or an area of computer code. This is one of the terrific clinical discoveries of the past 50 years, that in biology its biological information that runs the program.

Info drives the development of life. However what is the source of that information? Could it have been produced by an unguided Darwinian process? Or did it need intelligent design? When you wish to provide your computer system a brand-new function exactly what do you need to offer it? You offer it New computer code to inform it what to do. It's almost the exact same in living systems.

The Information Enigma is a remarkable 21-minute documentary that probes the secret of biological info, the difficulty it presents to orthodox Darwinian theory, and the factor it indicates intelligent design. The video features philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, and molecular biologist Douglas Axe, founder of the Biologic Institute.

Theories about the origin of life always presuppose understanding of the attributes of living cells. As historian of biology Harmke Kamminga has observed, "At the heart of the issue of the origin of life lies a fundamental question: What is it exactly that we are aiming to explain the origin of?" Or as the pioneering chemical evolutionary theorist Alexander Oparin put it, "The issue of the nature of life and the problem of its origin have actually ended up being inseparable." Origin-of-life researchers wish to describe the origin of the first and most likely most basic-- or, at least, minimally intricate-- living cell. As an outcome, advancements in fields that explicate the nature of unicellular life have historically defined the concerns that origin of-life scenarios need to answer.

Because the late 1950s and 1960s, origin-of-life scientists have actually progressively acknowledged the complex and particular nature of unicellular life and the biomacromolecules on which such systems depend. Further, molecular biologists and origin-of-life researchers have characterized this intricacy and uniqueness in informational terms.

+ Molecular biologists regularly describe DNA, RNA, and proteins as providers or repositories of "details." Numerous origin-of-life scientists now concern the origin of the info in these 223 biomacromolecules as the main concern facing their research study. As Bernd Olaf Kuppers has mentioned, "The problem of the origin of life is plainly basically comparable to the issue of the origin of biological information."