Failed to act? He was already giddily planning his response before the attacks even happened. He loves having an excuse to ramp up his genocide plans.

Just officializing something that’s been true for decades already.

I’ve often wondered how many ‘new species’ of fossils are actually just a juvenile example of a known species, sexual dimorphism of a known species, or just a variant of a known species that we wouldn’t call an entirely separate species if we were classifying the living animal…

Like … if you’d never discovered tadpoles before, you might easily think that they’re an entirely different species than frogs.

Or if you’d never seen a male deer before, you might think the antlers mean it’s an entirely different species from the female deer you’ve seen before.

Anybody got the text of the article? It doesn’t like noscript.

Missiles and drones can be intercepted and shot down.

A big dumb shell following a purely ballistic trajectory, though, is much more difficult to stop.

While we’re here … I’ve sometimes wondered, why the fuck did bioluminescent fungi evolve that ability?

Sure, lots of organisms have bioluminescence. Often used as signals to find mates or to attract prey. Occasionally as a way to confuse predators. Sometimes even as flashlights to cast light ahead and see better.

But a fungus has none of these motivations. It’s not trying to signal mates – it doesn’t need a mate to reproduce in the first place, and even if it did, their potential mates don’t have eyes to see the glow. They’re not trying to attract prey – they don’t actively hunt. Predators won’t be very confused – if anything, they’ll be attracted to it, making the fungus easier to find. And they’re certainly not using the illumination to see better – once again, they have no eyes.

And in addition to having no apparent benefits, bioluminescence has a lot of drawbacks as well. As mentioned before, it makes the fungus very easy to spot and identify for potential predators. It will also come at a significant metabolic energy cost. The energy of that light has to come from somewhere, and the cellular machinery necessary to produce it is complex and requires a lot of extra maintenance.

So … what’s in it for the fungus? Why would any fungus evolve this ability, and if one randomly did, how did this ability help it to survive, rather than quickly driving it to extinction? Why would any fungus want to glow?

Storing carbon in forests is a band-aid fix at best. Even if all the world’s greenery was restored as much as possible, that wouldn’t even bring us close to reversing the damage that’s already been done. The fossil fuels we’ve burned have released carbon that was stored and built up over millions of years, and it would take millions of years for all of it to be naturally stored again. It might not even be possible in modern climate conditions. Much of it was deposited in the carboniferous period, when earth’s climate and the life on earth were very different and much more conducive to depositing large amounts of carbon underground.

Investigating them … for being too good at making stuff? Is that a crime now?