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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.detoScience Memes@mander.xyzJet Fuel
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    4 days ago

    The big problem China faced and why the one-child policy was abandoned after all is that there was a staunch focus on having a male child to “keep the bloodline alive” (cultural reasoning) which led to a stagnation in the 0-14 years age group due to an overpopulation with males. This is not fixed by killing off your elderly.

    Covid was most deadly for the age group of 65 and above and in 2019, they had proportionally less people aged 65+ than the US (13.50% in China vs. 16.4% in the US). Either China’s scientists failed immensely or the virus stemmed from bad hygiene practices in livestock markets selling bats.






  • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.detoScience Memes@mander.xyzBBC Science
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    10 days ago

    Chromosomes are essentially packages of DNA and each end of a chromosome is extended by a protein called telomere, essentially sequences of “junk data” that protect the actual data (the DNA) from degradation or randomly fusing with other chromosomes. When cells split to renew, these telomeres are not fully copied to the new cell and thus shorten with each split. When they get too short, cells cannot split anymore, so there is a natural end to the renewal process (the so-called Hayflick limit).

    Lobsters possess an enzyme called telomerase which can repair telomeres and thus their cells can, in theory, divide indefinitely. They will still die naturally tho due to diseases or growing too large to sustain their body size and die of malnutrition, but they don’t age the way we do.



  • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.detoScience Memes@mander.xyzBBC Science
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    10 days ago

    Depends how you look at it. If you keep raising off-shoots from cuttings, you are essentially producing extensions of the very same plant and you can do that indefinitely. Think about it like cloning: an individual plant will eventually die, but it’s clone will survive and can still propagate.

    Plants are not biologically immortal like some lobsters for example.