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“i’m a butt scientist. I study butts”
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.......But the sea cucumber’s anus does not receive the recognition it deserves. “The moment you say ‘anus,’ you can hear a pin drop in the room,” Helm said. Bodily taboos have turned anuses across the tree of life into cultural underdogs, and scientific ones too: Not many researchers vocally count themselves among the world’s anus enthusiasts, which, according to the proud few, creates a bit of a blind spot—one that keeps us from understanding a fundamental aspect of our own biology.
The appearance of the anus was momentous in animal evolution, turning a one-hole digestive sac into an open-ended tunnel. Creatures with an anus could physically segregate the acts of eating and defecating, reducing the risk of sullying a snack with scat; they no longer had to finish processing one meal before ingesting another, allowing their tubelike body to harvest more energy and balloon in size.
Nowadays, anuses take many forms. Several animals, such as the sea cucumber, have morphed their out-hole into a Swiss Army knife of versatility; others thought that gastrointestinal back doors were so nice, they sprouted them at least twice. “There’s been a lot of evolutionary freedom to play around with that part of the body plan,” Armita Manafzadeh, a vertebrate morphology expert at Brown University, told me.
But anuses are also shrouded in scientific intrigue, and a fair bit of squabbling. Researchers still hotly debate how and when exactly the anus first arose, and the number of times the orifice was acquired or lost across different species. To tap into our origins, we’ll need to take a squarer look at our ends........
This sounds really interesting. They can even generate electricity from inside a building with these panels., sounds like panels inside a building are reclaiming some of the electricity used to power the lights.Polish firm opens cutting-edge solar energy plant
A Polish company on Friday launched the world's first industrial production line of solar panels based on groundbreaking perovskite technology, which could revolutionise access to solar power.techxplore.com
On a related note.Scientists Reveal How LSD Flattens the Brain's 'Energy Landscape' - Interesting Engineering
This psychedelic drug could "rewind" our brains, allowing for more dynamic thinking.interestingengineering.com
we're now able to correct for all the blurring of our microscope to the point that the largest blurring factor we have left is the fact that the atoms themselves are wobbling
Coincidentally, I finished the final episode of Orphan Black last night.A blind man can perceive objects after a gene from algae was added to his eye
Researchers are trying to genetically reengineer people’s retinas to restore vision.www.technologyreview.com
I'd read about this before but didn't get such good detail. I do have this condition and learning this has caused an epiphany. I never knew that the minds eye was actually supposed to produce images. All I've ever seen was darkness with a vague knowledge of what I should be imagining based on descriptions.