TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
/c/TenFoward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!
Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.
~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Hating someone off of their race, culture, creed, sexuality, or identity is not remotely acceptable. Mistakes can happen but do your best to respect others.
~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.
~ 3. Use spoiler tags. This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.
~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.
~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.
~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.
~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon' and fuck over our artist friends.
Fun will now commence.
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Honorary Badbitch:
@[email protected] for realizing that the line used to be "want to be added to the sidebar?" and capitalized on it. Congratulations and welcome to the sidebar. Stamets is both ashamed and proud.
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Overall science TL;DR
Relatively large single-celled organisms such as amoeba often engulf and digest other, smaller micro-organisms. Sometimes they're not digested and the smaller one just continues living inside the big one. This is a big deal because it's how we got mitochondria, which are thought to be descended from free-living, parasitic, tiny bacteria. As we all know, mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell, and indeed, without mitochondria, complex life as we know it could never have evolved. Chloroplasts also evolved this way.
There's been a lot of debate about at what point the little bacterium on the inside stops being thought of as a bacterium and starts being more of an organelle, because it's not just as simple as one organism inside another one, because symbiosis (a mutually beneficial relationship) isn't a binary condition. One facet of symbiosis that I find cool is the exchange of genetic material — did you know that mitochondria have their own genome that's much smaller than ours, and that mitochondrial genomes are inherited from your mum? Genes from the host cell can be transported to the little cell, and vice versa. They can become more optimised, just like how if you moved from a tiny, person flat into a fully equipped 5 bed family home, you might throw away your rusty tin opener.
Most of how this happened with mitochondria and chloroplasts is speculative because of how incredibly improbable this "endosymbiont event" would have been, but now we're getting to see that gradient of endosymbiosis play out, this time with a nitrogen-fixing (captures nitrogen from the air) and an algae. It's very cool, and I'm glad to learn of it.
If you find this stuff cool, one of my favourite pop-sci books I've ever read is Nick Lane's "Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life" — I read it the year before going to uni to study biochemistry and it was accessible, but I learned a ton! Message me if you want a pdf link.