When an arm gets severed (which the octopus can regrow), it hangs around for a bit, doing stuff, trying to feed a non-existent mouth. Kinda sad tbh.

Also, male octopuses have a special arm they use for mating. In some species, do avoid sexual cannibalism, they have developed a strategy of ripping it off, upon which it swims on its own towards the female to impregnate her. We live in a world where there are sentient penises swimming around and seeking to mate.

There is a weird evolutionary arms-race going on about the placenta. There are some genes that, via epigenic mechanisms, only activate when inherited from a parent of specific sex.

There are genes that activate when inherited from the father, and these genes make the placenta... bigger, stronger, more aggressive, more invasive, to make the baby big and strong, possibly at the expense of the mother and her future children (which may not be by the same father).

Then there are genes that activate when inherited from the mother, which do the opposite, and try to keep the placenta in check, to minimize the risk to the mother and keep the uterus in good condition for future children.

Obviously, you can't go too far in either direction. But over the span of evolution, the balance was shifting here and there, and the genes kept accumulating. Now we carry lot of useless baggage that cancels itself out in our genome.

Even if you try to read it slowly? German does have words with similarly long consonant combos, like "Durchschnitt" (which looks even scarier, though in terms of actual sounds, its r-ch-sch-n, if I'm not mistaken, which is 4 constants, same as "dršp")

It's not that hard, you just go letter by letter and sound it out. I get the impression that anglophones are oddly bad at doing this, probably because English has stupidly irregular spelling rules and is frankly a crime against the latin alphabet.

Adr like the beginning of "address", but pronouncing the "a" as it is in languages that aren't English ("ah")

špaš = shpash. Kinda like "splash", but starts with another "sh", without "l" (thus actually simpler?) and again, "a" like a proper Roman

The rest should be straightforward. "c" makes a "ts" sound and the ´s make the vowel longer.

Part of the reason is that during exercise, vessels leading to muscles also dilate, so the blood has somewhere to go and there is less stress on the cardiovascular system than if heart rate is increased in vacuum.

A sex cell has 1 copy of each chromosome. They are created by meiosis, i.e. a classical cell with 2 copies of each splits into 2 sex cells. During this process, each chromosome finds its buddy, so they split nicely and you end up with 1 copy of each, not random half. That would be bad.

In the person with 45 chromosomes (assuming this specific kind of mutation where 1 chromosome is fusion of 2), the combined chromosome pairs up with random one of the smaller ones, and the other is left without buddy. That's bad. If you are lucky, it ends up in the same cell as the other small chromosome. If you are not, it ends up in the other cell.

The article I linked in the first comment has nice pictures illustrating this.

Yes. Their children, however, would end up with 45 chromosomes, which would make it difficult, but not impossible, for them to reproduce. Their family has a long history of miscarriages, unfortunately.

There are actually humans with 44 chromosomes (22 pairs) walking around (typical human has 46 (23 pairs)).

The important thing to note is that these people have the exact same genes as anyone else, they're just organized differently - where other people have (2x)2 chromosomes, they have (2x)1 long fused one. Nothing is missing and nothing is extra, which sets them apart from people suffering from conditions like Down's.

Sorry, I was sloppy. "Solve in polynomial time" is what I meant.

It's a strong indication, but we still don't have a proof that P != NP, so no, not definitely.

Am programmer with masters in software engineering. Quantum computing is just something I'm vaguely interested in. I'd like to learn more about it, but shit's mind-boggling.

They were largely right until the example. To be fair, this is a common mistake, for sake of simplicity, or out of laziness, P and NP-complete problems are often explained as two opposite categories without mentioning all the other ones, so when people then hear that quantum computers can (easily) solve problems outside of P, they jump to the conclusion that they can solve NP-complete problems.

>An example of a task that is very tedious for a normal computer but easy for a quantum computer is so called "traveling salesman problem".

Not true. Travelling salesman is an NP-complete problem, quantum computers can't solve those any better than classical computers. See this diagram. P is what traditional computers are good at, BQP is quantum computers.

An example of a problem that quantum computers can solve (and classical probably can't) is prime factorization.

Mildly infuriating that 3 of the "Sincerely" options don't make sense

>Isn't every group of people an ethnoreligious group?

Like, every every? Are the people standing at bus stop an ethno-religious group?

>You share 99% of your DNA with a banana

No. Only 50%. You are confusing it with chimps.

>Is there some gene that only jews have or something?

Pretty much, and not just one. You can tell whether someone has Jewish ancestry by doing a DNA test.

Thought it was 2 photos at first! Cool shot, love the tropical-like look of the bottom hill.

It's a title gore, according to the article, he found them pickled, whole, before they had been sold.