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Cake day: December 9th, 2023

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  • porous_grey_matter@lemmy.mltomemes@lemmy.worldbugs
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    4 days ago

    No they aren’t lol, nothing alive now is descended from anything else alive now.

    They are somewhat related in the broad scheme of things, but not that close when you dig a bit deeper. They share a common ancestor about 400 million years ago (1, 2), whereas we share a common ancestor with them about 530 million years ago. Considering the more than 2 billion year history of life, you could say we are almost as related to them as they are to each other. It’s true that this was during the Cambrian explosion (3) so we are about as distantly removed from them as animals can be, and differentiation of biological features slowed down a bit after that, but still, true insects and the kinds of crustaceans we mostly eat like shrimps and lobsters have been on different branches of the evolutionary tree for most of the history of animals.

    Of course we (humans) do eat many land insects too, like crickets and so on.

    Here’s a fun zoomable graphic I found while looking up the dates: https://www.onezoom.org/life/@Pancrustacea=985906?otthome=%40%3D770311#x-28,y311,w0.8390









  • I worked in France for a while and I deeply agree with everything you said… Except μ is by far the most useful Greek letter since it is used as a prefix for units of measurement, e.g. μm, μL, etc.

    Also the Swiss layout is even worse, it combined all the bad features of the French and German keyboards and then just moves around all the symbols a bit more for good measure.


  • Atoms are most stable when they have a certain number of electrons around them, described as “having a full shell”. A neutral chlorine atom is one electron short of having a full shell, and a neutral sodium atom has one electron more than a full shell. Therefore, neutral chlorine will rip an electron off just about anything, causing damage, while neutral sodium will push its extra electron away, same deal. That is why they are such reactive chemicals. Once they’ve done that process they are stable.

    Then, as the other poster described, they are oppositely charged, so they are attracted to each other with medium strength, but not strongly bonded, which, to simplify it somewhat, is when atoms share electrons which both of them would like to have.