A villain uses a device to swap bodies with the hero. As soon as they wake up in the hero’s body they immediately start screaming bloody murder from all the pain. When they look at the hero in their body all they say is “sorry but thanks for giving me some respite.”
She is not directly paid for her work to vet papers, she has been hit with legal action & death threats by scientists who hate that she’s exposing them and their financial fraud, and she keeps at it every single day, combing through thousands of papers to make science more fair. Please consider supporting her!
I KNOW that playing God is morally wrong, but holy HELL, it looks fun.
Why is it playing God? We aren’t violating any natural laws. God set the parameters of the universe to allow these things. There’s nothing wrong with it, there’s no hubris in learning more about how to manipulate the universe around us.
We made a whole-ass fish.
The reason this was accidental BTW is because they used paddlefish eggs as a negative control group for a breeding experiment on sturgeons because the scientists, quite naturally, assumed that they were SO unrelated it would be genetically impossible for them to mate. Like. I cannot stress enough to you how these creatures last related ancestors were
140 MILLION YEARS BACK.
If you don’t know how far that is, that’s basically the start of the cretaceous. Let me simplify that for you even further. Chimpanzees and humans seperated, what, 5 or 6 million years ago?
This is basically like if humans could hybridise with THESE THINGS.
This is the sort of thing that should be impossible. They used those eggs to be ABSOLUTELY 100% SURE NOTHING WOULD HAPPEN.
And then THEY GOT FISH OUT OF IT.
Like. You can quite clearly understand why they didn’t think anything would happen. WE ARE MORE RELATED TO BLUE WHALES THAN THESE THINGS.
THE AMERICAN PADDLEFISH AND THE STURGEON ARE SO COMPLETELY UNRELATED THAT THIS IS NOT PLAYING GOD. IF ANYTHING THIS IS AN ACT OF GOD.
THE SCIENTISTS HAD NO BLAME IN THIS BECAUSE NOTHING LIKE THIS HAD EVER HAPPENED BEFORE
It sort of goes against the rules of genetics a bit.
Oh i forgot to add
THESE THINGS, FOR HYBRIDS, HAD A REALLY HIGH SURVIVAL RATING. LIKE 70% OF THEM SURVIVED.
To put that into perspective, getting a blue whale and a squirrel and trying to hybridise them is more sensible, and that wouldn’t produce anything but getting you banned from science. Most animals that aren’t plants can barely hybridise two degrees away from each other.
BUT THESE TWO ENTIRELY UNRELATED FISH create PERFECTLY HEALTHY HYBRIDS.
the scientists literally had to do the tests AGAIN just to be like “okay this is real right. This is actually like, not a fluke, this works right” and it worked again. They just Can!
So for those who don’t know what the original fishes look like, this is an American Paddlefish:
And this is a Russian Sturgeon:
So honestly, saying the hybrid is “weird looking” is a bit fort de café when you see its parents. I think the sturddlefish looks cute.
“these creatures last related ancestors were 140 million years back”
(glances at fish)
Yeah that’s exactly what I thought you’d look like, you Mesozoic fuck
#Holding a red squirrel in my left hand and a blue whale in my right desperately hoping to make a purple squale (via @dykepuffs)
This is actually so insane. Now I desperately need all of the test results and stuff of these guys that the scientists did. Can the sturddlefish reproduce? Are they a viable animal outside the lab (like can they hunt/find food enough to sustain themselves)? Just, what the fuck happened???
Marie Curie’s notebooks are crazy once you think about it. They’re so radioactive they have to be sealed in a lead box. Imagine a world where atomic theory is forgotten and a dude just goes “yea there’s a book that details the secrets of the universe, the machinations of the creation of existence down to its barest essentials, but if you get close to it you fucking die. The more you read it the more your body slowly disassembles into mush.” like wat excuse me
I only hate certain types of fic the same way I hate mosquitos and ticks. Like get these nasty little buggers away from me but also I respect their place in the ecosystem.
Me, spraying bug spray: blocked.
Listen and sometimes? To enjoy running through a beautiful field of grass and flowers (ao3) you have to tolerate the fact that bugs (fics you don’t like) are there and maybe you will even encounter one, but you can use bugspray (filtered tags) to reduce the likelihood of that. Because the alternative is not getting to experience the beautiful field of grass and flowers.
And some of my mutuals happen to be entomologists. Which is also cool.
The skeleton of a young girl, about 14 years old, was found in a room [in Pompeii] holding an eleven-month-old baby in her arms. The infant was adorned with bronze ornaments, which shows it belonged to the higher classes. The girl cannot be the mother, since she was still in her prepubertal phase. Moreover she clearly did not belong to the upper class. An analysis of her teeth reveals that she had been severely ill or undernourished in the first year of her life. Various molars displayed abscesses and shortly before her death a few teeth had been extracted. Her shoulder muscles bore traces of unremitting physical effort caused by lifting heavy weights. Most probably, Bisel concludes, she was a slave girl who was given the care of the baby by her master, unfit for other tasks, as she was worn down by hard labor.
another one for the ‘incredibly haunting archeological find descriptions’ files [“child slaves at work in roman antiquity,” christian laes]
“This is a tapestry I made myself! I just finished it!”
“…. this is…. big.”
“Eighty feet long, ten high, in forty panels! It was originally going to be sixty feet, but then the Thomas Malory Arthuriana got big and I had to put more stuff in.”
“… Malory published in the fifteenth century.”
“Do you have any idea how long it takes one person to embroider eight thousand square feet of tapestry?”
“You’ve had a lot of free time in the last eight hundred years, haven’t you?”
my corner store guy is a 50 year old man who’s my best friend in the world and recently he was like “you’re too pretty to be single I have some nephews you should meet. very handsome!” and I was like “a niece might be more up my alley” and he just got more excited and said “ah even better! I was overselling my nephews but my nieces are very beautiful”
Danny that breaks into Tim’s apartment after a mission gone wrong but it’s actually Timber’s apartment and Tim and Danny are both awkward abt it bc lowkey there’s still something there and Danny feels like an intruder Tim feels guilty but Bernard. Bernard sees only opportunity
