Viewing profile — contingo

But it's not a "hitherto conjectured form of symbiosis". It's just another example of facultative lichenization, which has already been observed in species quite widely scattered a…

I'm skeptical that this discovery amounts to a "new type of coexistence". Fungi that are facultatively lichenized (having growth forms that include or exclude algae) have been know…

From the article: >The donated shoes that ended up in Indonesia have added to a flood of illegal second-hand clothing pouring into that developing country, according to a senior go…

Many different groups of fish have independently evolved locomotion by "walking" on modified pectoral fins. One of my favorite examples are the bamboo sharks, among which are some …

It's woefully wrong for something in the primary literature. Yes, I understood what information they were sloppily failing to be precise about. If I were refereeing this paper I'd …

From the introduction, which starts by trying to give some wider taxonomic context: >The genus Ilex comprises about 450 species growing in the tropical regions of South America and…

SALT_VERSE just uses still images generated by DALL•E-2 and Midjourney. They're animated using techniques that have already been around for a long time: panning around and zooming …

The biological term "symbiosis", by itself, in the strict sense, doesn't imply a benefit for both parties, it just describes a persistent and physically close association between t…

Psilocybin-producing mushrooms are widely dispersed across the clade of all other true mushrooms and their genomes clearly show there is no great mystery about their evolutionary h…

Tunicates evolved long before animals that you would recognize as typical vertebrates. In their free-swimming larval state, tunicates do have a "notochord", or nerve chord, running…

OK, I looked at some piano roll layouts in DAWs, and found examples with equal spacing between semitones, you're right. I looked at some music mapped onto this layout. The layout a…

It makes sense in the context of tonal harmony. An octave is the interval between the 1st and 8th notes of a major or minor scale. I.e. a major or minor scale repeats itself (at do…

OK, I looked at some piano roll layouts in DAWs, and found examples with equal spacing between semitones, you're right. I looked at some music mapped onto this layout. The layout a…

I don't trust you. You're just used to thinking in terms of the piano keyboard. As I said before, the distance between two adjacent white keys on a piano roll could be a major seco…

A piano roll visualization gives a somewhat more immediate depiction of intervallic information. But it isn't absolutely proportionately spaced, it's mapped to keyboard topology. T…

Were you implying that a different kind of everyday notation exists that could be a significant improvement on the traditional system? I understand that various alternative notatio…

Correct, DNA is just one element of a complete organismal informatics, you need vastly more than just the genome sequence to ressurect a species. Relatively simple microbes, or rec…

In the past my research has overlapped a fair bit with alpha taxonomy. Actually, whimsically or unconventionally named species are fairly common. Here are three examples that come …

Do you count orangutans as "local Malaysians"? In any case, the rainforest is certainly useful to all of the indigenous humans whose home and way of life are also being destroyed. …

There are many co-existing species concepts used in practice that are statistically rigorously defined, selected according to the biology of the lineage in question (e.g. it makes …

You evidently haven't encountered the biodynamic viticulture people, who are everywhere these days. They will tell you to buy a wine because its grapes were harvested when the star…

It's a fascination problem. Everything falls into place when what genuinely deeply interests you coincides with your work, with the source of your motivation to work, and with the …

As the article hints, the concept of an individual is a very slippery thing in filamentous fungi. A single hyphal network can contain genetic material from more than two parental s…

The 06-10-2010 version of this document (the linked one is 27-03-2009) is the one still bundled with the Blender source.

It just means they're headed for extinction in the wild, but that some populations are maintained in captivity. The term 'domestication' would not normally be used in this case, be…