Tag: homeobox

solarpunk-aesthetic:

This adorable little robot is designed to make sure its photosynthesising passenger is well taken care of. It moves towards brighter light if it needs, or hides in the shade to keep cool. When in the light, it rotates to make sure the plant gets plenty of light. It even likes to play with humans.

Oh, and apparently, it gets antsy when it’s thirsty.

The robot is actually an art project called “Sharing Human Technology with Plants” by a roboticist named Sun Tianqi. It’s made from a modified version of a Vincross HEXA robot, and in his own words, it’s purpose is “to explore the relationship between living beings and robots.”

I don’t care if it’s silly. I want one.

pomegranate, blueberry, kiwi, papaya, star fruit (hard mode: aside from the vampire squid)

honestly. how dare you. the vampire squid is the low-hanging fruit that i use when i can’t come up with anything better. i was into the vampire squid when i was 12. do you think i’m basic or something

anyway.

pomegranate: when do you feel the most confident?

while setting up a punchline in a group i have a good sense of already; when i’m discussing a journal article w other people; s*x, sometimes, tbh. basically situations where it’s not necessarily that i am exactly right/going to do everything right, even though there’s a decent chance i will, but that i’m sure that i can come across as smart and interesting and valuable regardless.

blueberry: what do you want to dress up as for halloween?

presumably as always i will try to come up with something charmingly esoteric and end up panicking and improvising with whatever i have in my wardrobe. if i’m really lazy or preferably doing several days of costumes then i may repeat last year’s Cambridge Youth Dying Of Consumption. 

kiwi: what’s something that fascinates you?

architecture & architecture theory, not that i like, know or understand anything about it.

papaya: what song describes your aesthetic?

aesthetically, i exist at the intersection of “kiss me, son of god” by tmbg and “staring at the sun” by tv on the radio. i am the middle of that venn diagram.

star fruit: favorite sea creature?

i appreciate the way that tunicates are extremely unlikely-seeming chordates that move from tadpole to notochordless colonies or superficially sea-cucumber-like organisms. plus it’s really cute to watch the backs of the larvae zip themseves up into tiny protonotochords!

🌻

as you know, bob, c. elegans roundworm are primarily self-fertilizing hermaphrodites, and males actually occur with a nondisjunction event– hermaphrodites are XX and males are XO, meaning the cell didn’t get all of the X chromosomes it was supposed to have at some point during division. this means that normally males are very rare (<1/1000), since in most cases (example exceptions: the worm sex thing, trisomy 21/down’s syndrome in humans) losing or having an extra chromosome is pretty disastrous for development, and so there are a lot of mechanisms in place to prevent nondisjunction. there is an exception to this, however: if you’re a scientist (as some people are) and want a lot of males so you can perform a cross between two strains, you can just leave the worms at 37˚C for a few hours, and a lot (25%ish ime) of the eggs they lay hatch into males, and these males can then mate with hermaphroditic worms of one’s choice.

this, of course, all just reveals the essential difference between worms and spaghetti: 

worms aren’t straight until you heat them up.