i’m just a jeepster for your love!

The reason AI programs like Gemini are programmed to encourage you to let it make basic life choices for you like what restaurant you should eat at is because they intend to monetize your patronage.

It's just a matter of time before the AI stops offering you the most highly rated option in the area or whatever aligns most closely to what you requested (If it's even doing that now) and instead only recommends restaurants that have paid the company for that privilege.

Restaurants that won't pay Google to recommend them to AI users are going to become functionally invisible, whereas those who are willing to purchase what amounts to targeted advertisements laundered through an AI "friend" will get new customers regardless of their quality.

But we didn't know WHAT those specific genes in pea plants were exactly, we just knew how they were transmitted and expressed, we were the exact same as Mendel after all this time

Holy shit. You're right. Barnacles are crustaceans, like shrimp and crabs.

As a juvenile It's a leggy lil guy that floats around filter-feeding and molting like a shrimp.

When it finds a group of Adult barnacles already living somewhere, it grabs onto that surface, cements itself there, and builds a hard calcium-based shell 'house' to live in.

It then twists around, metamorphs a bit, and reaches its legs out the top of its house to grab food floating by to pull it to its mouth.

They don't harm the surface they attach to, and are still arthropods/crustaceans under that hard shell. Those are bug houses, with bugs inside.

Wait

is this the same post where I said "I thought this was more common knowledge!" last year and got inexplicably dragged for it? Happy anniversary to that!

So you may have also heard that a barnacle has the largest longest penis to body ratio of any animal, this is only the acorn barnacles! Every acorn barnacle has both ovaries and a giant penis, so by settling down near each other they can all reach over and get eachother pregnant without ever having to get up.

This flesh snowflake has also gone around tumblr in a few posts but for those who haven't seen it, this is Dendrogaster, very closely related to barnacles, but it loses all recognizable crustacean anatomy as it matures into a rubbery tree that lives inside starfish. The only truly parasitic barnacle that you can TELL is a barnacle, and the only one to go after vertebrate hosts, is a goose barnacle called Anelasma that embeds itself in deep-sea dogsharks:

......At least, we thought that was all, but in 2018 one was also found parasitizing the inside of a huge greenland shark's ass:

Here's a comparison with the parasitic Anelasma on the left and a normal goose barnacle on the right:

Anelasma is so weird, it no longer uses its legs to filter feed and its mouth is almost vestigial. It turned its stalk into a tuber-like "root" that absorbs nutrients from shark flesh :) Evolution does this kind of stuff all the time!

The videos of people scraping barnacles off of sea turtles and stuff is actually hurting the turtle much worse than the barnacles, which would naturally die and drop off as the turtle migrates regularly between warmer and colder waters. Wildlife professionals only remove barnacles from animals if those animals are sick and sluggish for other reasons, because that allows an abnormal number of barnacles along with tube worms, sponges and other stationary sea life to build up and weigh an animal down.

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

It also includes these fascinating paragraphs about the role of estrogen in different types of physical activity, directly debunking the widespread notion that estrogen is the weak human's hormone and only does weak human things:

Given the fitness world's persistent touting of the hormone testosterone for athletic success, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that estrogen, which females typically produce more of than males, plays an incredibly important role in athletic performance… The estrogen receptor—the protein that estrogen binds to in order to do its work—is deeply ancient. Joseph Thornton of the University of Chicago and his colleagues have estimated that it is around 1.2 billion to 600 million years old—roughly twice as old as the testosterone receptor. In addition to helping regulate the reproductive system, estrogen influences fine-motor control and memory, enhances the growth and development of neurons, and helps to prevent hardening of the arteries. Important for the purposes of this discussion, estrogen also improves fat metabolism. During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates. Fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrates do, so it burns more slowly, which can delay fatigue during endurance activity. Not only does estrogen encourage fat burning, but it also promotes greater fat storage within muscles… which makes that fat's energy more readily available. Adiponectin, another hormone that is typically present in higher amounts in females than in males, further enhances fat metabolism while sparing carbohydrates for future use, and it protects muscle from breakdown. Anne Friedlander of Stanford University and her colleagues found that females use as much as 70 percent more fat for energy during exercise than males. Estrogen's ability to increase fat metabolism and regulate the body's response to the hormone insulin can help prevent muscle breakdown during intense exercise. Furthermore, estrogen appears to have a stabilizing effect on cell membranes that might otherwise rupture from acute stress brought on by heat and exercise. Ruptured cells release enzymes called creatine kinases, which can damage tissues… Linda Lamont of the University of Rhode Island and her colleagues, as well as Michael Riddell of York University in Canada and his colleagues, found that females experienced less muscle breakdown than males after the same bouts of exercise. Tellingly, in a separate study, Mazen J. Hamadeh of York University and his colleagues found that males supplemented with estrogen suffered less muscle breakdown during cycling than those who didn't receive estrogen supplements.