A few days ago I shared some news that the Eurovision song from Israel would be named “Your land is mine now” to later realize it was from an onion kind of website, lol.
I hope I’m not alone in this kind of f’up.
This happened in a biology class where we had groups of people trying to get the DNA out of fruits and vegetables, my group had chosen an onion, in an effort to try and be the cool kid I ate some of the onion, no one noticed.
Do fruits have DNA?!? Like unique DNA like human do?
They do! Though I think their genome is a lot simpler
Oh man, sometimes yes but sometimes not so much. Know how humans have 23 chromosomes? And we’re diploid, which means they come in pairs of 2?
Some plants have a few more pairs than that - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyploidy And some plants have way WAY more than 23 chromosomes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organisms_by_chromosome_count There’s a plant at the bottom of that list that has 1260 chromosomes.
I only took 1 botany class back in college, so I don’t know or remember enough to talk about this in more depth. I really only know enough to be shocked by how crazy a plant’s genuine can be.
The way I’ve had it explained to me, plants as a general rule have a much, much larger genome than animals. The reason is simple. When an animal runs into a problem like not enough water, it can just get up and move. Plants are rooted where they are, prey to whatever comes along. They have to develop an arsenal of genes to deal with different situations, whether that’s drought resistance or producing various toxins so that animals don’t make a meal of them. It’s not like animals don’t do this to some degree - the immune system is incredibly elaborate - but not as much.
Except for onions, ironically.
I got reverse onioned a little while ago. There was an article about a kids version of the AR-15 called the JR-15, and it was so ludicrous and I didn’t know that website, I thought it was a satirical article for a while… Weeks later I mentioned it as a joke, but my brother said it was real and I checked and saw he was right.
It’s a .22lr though, which is common for teaching kids firearms safety. The only difference between that and the usual .22lr squirrel hunting rifles is it has a few cosmetic features like a pistol grip and a detachable mag rather than an 1880s style mag tube under the barrel. It’s also largely injection molded so it’ll also be lighter than said regular hunting rifle (and of course you could still hunt with this and it takes optics easier thanks to the 1913 rail.)
Probably a lot safer to just not give a gun to a child
And leave that kid totally defenceless against all the armed kids in the playground? What sort of monster are you?
I learned a few years ago that the Duke is, in fact, not frozen waiting to be resuscitated. Of course I only learned this after arguing with my prof in film class about it. Classic urban legend. Now I’m worried about any other hoaxes I might have absorbed in the pre-Internet years. At least I know that the Glomar Explorer was not looking for manganese nodules.
Who’s frozen? Who is “the Duke?”
