#functional biology

[mindblowingscience]

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine recently uncovered strong evidence that enriching the air with fragrances improves cognitive performance by strengthening a critical connection between neurological areas involving memory and decision-making. Their experiment, involving 43 men and women aged 60 to 85, suggests cognitive decline and conditions such as dementia might be slowed by simply diffusing a different choice of perfumes through the bedroom before bed each night. Keeping the old gray matter stimulated as we age is vital to maintaining good cognitive health. That doesn't just mean keeping up with the daily crossword – it means peppering our environment with all kinds of sights and sounds for the brain to chew on.

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[platypu]

[charseraph]

[squephalopod]

Opisthoteuthis californiana

i prefer soft bottoms and i cannot lie

[gallusgalluss]

some stuff relating to Plains Woodwind herds and their different species variations.

Both Plainswinds and Waspwinds live in Herd Communities, while Lowinds typically live solitary lives, only grouping up when necessary.

[bonebrokebuddy]

Kryptonian Biology Prompts #1

Due to the combination of the facts that Clark’s heart canonically thrums rather than beats and his voice has been mentioned to have a resonant quality to it (generally by Bruce).

I propose that evolutionarily Kryptonian have some form of their anatomy that connects their heart to their vocal cords, causing their voice to automatically “hum” whenever they speak, think evolutionary wackery akin to the laryngeal nerve in giraffes.

Thankfully, it could likely be written off as a naturally gravely or raspy voice that would decrease during times of lack of physical duress.

While this means that Kryptonian’s could theoretically purr, it also means they would only do so when under extreme amounts of duress or physical exertion as their heartbeat would need to rise above normal levels to cause their vocal cords to thrum without also speaking. As a result, it could only be heard in circumstances where a Kryptonian is horribly injured & near death or is exhausted & out of breath (a Very difficult feat.)

[diana-andraste]

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind...

Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

[seawing-vibes]

15 for the ask game?

 15. Any design headcanons?

I'll just bullet-point my thoughts for this one!!

Mudwings: Nothing really <3 I imagine they'd wear the most accessories & items with them, usually local plant life or accessories gifted from siblings. Very alligator-based with crackly dried-mud-looking scale patterns.

Skywings: BIRDS <3 Feathered Skywings are my favorite. I sometimes draw them with just feathered wings, but overall feathery dragons for these guys. The ratio of scales to feathers varies, but mainly small feathers along the back, feathered wings, and scaled legs, and occasionally scaled face. Ancient skywings had fewer feathers, but modern Skywings have more and more feathers.

Icewings: The royal family & most nobles have antlered horns! They do shed, and artwork is often commissioned from the shed horns. They have false horn-headdresses they wear to official meetings when their horns are shed. Baby icewings have fibrous "fur" that goes away as they age, but many icewings still have a fluffy underbelly. Also, they're invertebrates. They are so far away from all the other tribes on the cladogram. Ancient Icewings don't look much different than modern Icewings. Hemocyanin in their copper-rich blood-looking ass. you can find more rambling about this in the tags of this post lmao

Seawing: You can see my notes on them here!

Rainwings: They have prehensile tails & can have multiple frills! There are two types of Rainwing, python-like ones with pit organs and no outer ear, and then the more bird-like guys with external ears & beaks who have advanced vocal cords to imitate sounds better! Other then that nothing really significant.

Sandwings: Hooded Sandwings my beloved! Give them hoods! If my fellow Wings of Fire Amino survivors remember the drama 'round this, I'm sorry. But I think there are some Sandwings with hoods & some with frills! But that's p much it

Nightwings: My favorite headcanons! Their wings reflect the night sky at their date of birth, and the longer they spend under the night sky, the more star-like scales appear on them! Old Nightwings often have near-white backs & shoulders due to exposure to the stars, like almost but not really sun bleaching.

sorry pantalans no headcanons for you :( gotta study bugs more before I feel confident enough to start developing designs for yall

[theres-whump-in-that-nebula]

When you have to take off your socks to change into clean socks and your bare feet touch the floor for exactly fifteen seconds and the dry, smooth sensation makes you want to chop your toes off

[juregim]

i genuinely think that the funniest aspect of this whole 'gifted kids' 'AP classes' thing is that those classes are at least two years behind the standards in Kazakhstan, and from what i gather, most of the world

[darlin-djarin]

wait until star wars fans hear about the endosymbiotic theory

[abtl]

So yeah I only just heard about the concept of "wetware" and knowing that people are actually working on this kind of technology while I'm nerding and fixating on ULTRAKILL all day hits me with a very peculiar mix of feelings that I can't quite put my finger on at the moment.

[hordemama]

More Space Rabbit Morphs!!

I hope this is a better example for your question @drawingsphopho !

Albinism usually expresses itself as hairlessness(which includes whiskers and much of the ears) and underdeveloped and/or weak eyes. This rabbit, however, retained a medium length shag coat from a parent! This is pretty rare, but considering the random toss up of genes rabbits pass down, it's not unheard of to see genes "cancel eachother out".

TRUE Melanism is pretty rare. Instead, most dark rabbits are a sleek dark brown. Because of this, not many individuals express patterns or differing exoskeleton colors. Seems to be the darker the color the more suppressed the patterns!

Mosaic genes (like chimerism), piebaldism, and vitiligo are surprisingly common among space rabbits! This is most likely due to their high birth rate and common reproductive issues. They can even develop similar looking discoloration and age spots as they shed old, strained, or damaged carapaces. These are common in athletes and other such hard physical work. Kind of like metal as hell permanent bruises! The individual pictured has splotches similar to blaschko lines in humans that trace the shapes of the exoskeleton.

[transingthoseformers]

Oh, and a contributing factor on why Optimus as well will become hyper protective of the sparkling?

Orion canonically spent some of his formative years in the wilds of Cybertron. Now, he's mostly calmed down from his legitimately feral tendencies, but. There's certain experiences you don't forget when knowing more about nature than the average mech or human. He's likely exactly seen how brutally uncaring nature has with Cybertronian wildlife (which I do assume exists and at least some of it can sexually reproduce). Animals don't have morals when it comes to survival, and I've mentioned the correlation between reproductive strategies and offspring mortality rates in nature.

And, i mean, think about what we've established in the TFP au. Transformer (i use this term specifically for members of Cybertronus cybertronii) appear to have practically minuscule gestational periods as compared to their way longer lifespans, and the sparklings are born rather small and squishy, only developing defining traits such as hardened armor pigments and more kibble later on. Small and squishy is cute, yes, but doesn't tend to fly in nature well.

[witchofthesouls]

I've been thinking about your rodimus/liason/getaway with a sparkling and was wondering how you think it would go if the liason got cyberformed into a cybertronian body?

Messy AF.

Getaway in a relationship will be messy, but one with Rodimus and with a cyberformed Liaison whose frame constantly slams his own hang-ups over his own MTO history with Golden Age Functionism?

(Side note: Getaway is beginning to realize something is… off with you. Here, Reader is human that's Fae-Touched. And apparently, it transfers across species.)

__________

Your frame is strange. Different. A stark contrast between you and the rest of them.

Rung is fond of the free-hanging cables that mimic your old hair. Fly-away strays and how the malleable strands follow the curve of your neck. It's a long-gone style of a different era, and even Cyclonus could testify to its antiquity. Something from the Age of Primal Tribes.

All Getaway could see is how he could fist it easily. Pull your unprotected helm back, trace all the details of your crest, slide his palm up to your twitching, fluttering audials, neck-cables bare to his sight.

Smooth and unblemished and so very easy to press a blade into it.

(The hot spray of Energon is intimately familiar to his servos.)

_______

You and Rodimus paint a hedonistic picture. The Prime's glossy hues of cherry-red and sunny-yellow, a tapered waist, and tantalizing peaks of protoform and cables already turn heads, but everyone is deeply aware of you.

Dressed in shades of blue, you're plush and soft and delicate compared to them. Your armor is something that Getaway has only seen visuals: pure civilian-grade armature. Not even capable of withstanding one blast shot. Something he could easily peel away with his own hands.

Rodimus has always been enamored by you and your mouth. Warm and slippery with so much solvent, even as a mecha, it's as wet as your old human self.

Rodimus kisses away every scoff and drinks up each sigh you make, pressing his own mouth into sensitive, exposed seams to make your lips part in surprise and that sprawling field pulse out wanton, blazing lust.

Because Rodimus can easily steal your mouth and is the first to taste you upon his own glossa, Getaway is the first to claim your valve.

You're factory fresh. The untested calipers and untouched nodes. Getaway's careful, working with your new body's inexperience rather than plowing through it like hysterical MTOs after their first trial by fire.

Rodimus drags your attention away as Getaway sinks deeper and deeper into your frame, pushing apart each tight ring of calipers in slow, measured thrusts. Timing it just-so to move as that little valve relaxes. When he manages to fully sit inside and start an easy pace, it spasms and cycles strangely, gripping him like you're still made of flesh and bone, a pulsing arrhythmic clench.

He coaxes your spike-housing to open and fists the soft protoform there. You tip fast. Back arching beautifully, hair-cables splayed across the sheets, and blue legs wrapped his waist as he switched to short, deep strokes. That very first overload resets your calipers, and it starts to milk him properly.

Rodimus claims your scream, but it's Getaway's spike that has your valve rippling madly, his transfluid that coats your insides first.

(Because he's spec ops, Getaway sneaks into the medbay to see if he could bypass the Hatchet, and he can. Getaway copies the official and unofficial documents and notes and studies them until it burns in his brain module.

You're a curiosity. You're missing quite a few things.

It extended to your reproductive hardware as well. You lack the hydraulics in your spike and lack a primary reservoir to produce any nanites.

In a way, you're a macabre reflection of a MTO. Made for civilian life rather than warfare. You can only be a carrier, and Getaway can only sire.)

________

"You're such a liar." It isn't a condemnation. Your tone is between fond and teasing. Even your field remains light-hearted.

You have no alt-mode, no T-cog, and no weaponry system. If you mouthed off to the wrong mech, you would be lucky to walk away relatively intact.

You're sprawled across the couch. Out of that ridiculous armor and into a far more ridiculous sleeping gown. Nothing but bare protoform.

(In the Golden Age, you would have been worse than useless with no T-cog, but with those strange, human quirks and that sinful mouth, you would have been an excellent Songbird. Whose senator's lap would you grace with your delectable frame?)

Getaway drinks the shape of your lips and the expression on your face as he holds you down. If he had a mouth, he would have licked every cable lining your neck, trace all those bright green biolights until his glossa seared away, and feasted between your legs until he could sink denta into your spark chamber.

But Getaway lacks all of those things, so he makes it up by leaving bruising taps on your protoform and imprints on your armor.

He feels the wetness from your valve through the thin scrap of cloth, and there's the flickering in your bright optics. The blue (liberty blue, seethes some wretched part inside him) is overtaken by the white of your pupils.

He takes you because he can and it's another thing he keeps score against Rodimus.

You're burning hot, gripping him with your arms and legs as he crushes with enough force that would have broken your old organic form. The gown flung elsewhere, and you're completely vulnerable, whimpering and gasping in his shoulder, protoform sliding across his armor as he finds every spot makes you dig your denta into his frame.

[pantherloid]

Please yap, I want to hear about the non-bio thing about Len

Okay!!! Im not gonna articulate it well so it's gonna be all over the place.

Ive said (too many times) that my hcs of len (and any other vocasynth) is theyre either physical robots or they exist in your 'puter.

At first I almost said "non-human" to mean like its a character thats not born and so doesnt live a human life like go through developmental stages, have parents that theyre born from, have a childhood especially, ET CETERA right, but non-human makes it sound like its furries or monsters so that doesnt make any sense.

Non-biological feels accurate bc there is no BIRTH and no developmental stages, no lived experiences/past experiences, and basically, i want the character to exist in a void!! No ties, no meaningful connections.

A little bit off tangent... I've had my old fursona (oldest oc) in my head for the longest time and theyre supposed to be one of these characters that Do Not Exist like theyre not a "person" who goes through life and experiences, theyre an entity that... exists in...SOME way, and I was never able to convey that idea UNTIL like last year, after experimenting for a long time with len hcs where hes a digital being, it kinda clicked. This non-existing character type that I've been wanting to convey can be well translated as a digital being or like a computer program. I think i want to say this character type is entirely intangible, like computer programs, so they "dont exist"...but you wouldn't say a computer program is "not real" right, like um WHERE AM I GOING.

Anyways HAVE YOU EVER seen that tumblr post (i think) about hatsune miku, gorillaz, and the muppets being not real but also... real... bc they exist in the real world and we talk about them *Vsauce music* or SOMETHING like that...

Where am i going now ah. The kagami-ne mirror images thing is so good because to me there is no way this makes sense if i think of them as flesh and blood people like DA HELL you mean theyre mirror images, the concept simply does not work. Like look i assume people who hc rin and len as twins hc them as 'people' because---

((context i made a tweet a while ago, i said : "I lean more on the mirror images interpretation than twins like siblings." "In my hc theyre not people so theyre not ""siblings"" bc you'd have to be born for that?? Theyre probably more like clones but also not BIOLOGICALLY bc theyre either robots/digital beings like i always say." ---

because twins suggest biology. Like they were fetuses in a womb together, man where am i going again.

The mirror images thing is really cool when theyre thought of as just ENTITIES. Just person-like beings that are just copy pasted like no further or deeper explanations. Theyre simply not real!!!!

- - -

After yapping I realized it all comes down full circle to my escapist ass not wanting anything connected to the real world. Like the way i draw len or my human ocs, theyre only supposed to resemble humans, they should not look "real" as in look like they could be someone who you could spot when you leave your house or something.