Many sequences of rRNA remain pretty much the same across all known animals. But Han noticed something unusual in those from the octopus: an unexpected gap that broke what’s usually one rRNA fragment in other creatures into two.

Given how widespread and highly conserved ribosomal RNA is, and how simple the mutation appears to be, it seems unlikely that this is the first time it’s arisen in the whole history of animal life. There must be some other tradeoff that octopuses found a workaround for—maybe it’s related to why they’re so short-lived?

Don’t the Chinese get tired of having every route to their country being named the “X Silk Road”?

While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

—Eugene Debs

several sound-responsive structures could be built into a single flexible device, with each one reacting to a different sound frequency. “This would allow specific parts of the device to move, bend or vibrate, potentially leading to aerodynamic robotic devices that can change shape in response to sound,” he says.

I’m picturing Yondu’s whistle-powered dart.

It’s important to distinguish between predictive models and explanatory models, and between local models and global models.

The title implies an issue with global explanatory models, but the article describes issues with local predictive models.

Conversation logs between the lab and Luna show that the agent had created an attendance policy but later lost track of it, allowing the employee’s lateness to continue for months.

Sounds like Luna should look into firing itself.

It’s just a list of their customers.

He was visited by the ghost of Ted Stevens.

The idea that Trump’s “intel” team was inclined to dismiss the threat is the first thing that makes me think it might have been real after all.

I’m surprised the chip wasn’t sold on the black market before the missile was assembled.

We don’t make shirtwaists any more, so locking workers in factories is now perfectly safe! (And they say we don’t learn from history.)

Quietness is a quality easy to overlook until you find yourself reluctant to use it for fear of waking up everyone in your household/apartment building/surrounding neighborhood.

He dropped out because he was the weak candidate.

How did he assess that, though? Especially when the candidate he told his supporters to vote for instead only got 16.4% of the vote compared to his own 50.4%.

Why did Smith drop out early if he was facing such a weak field? Was there some personal scandal?

My point isn’t whether or not the best candidate won, it’s that the outcome depended on how many candidates each faction split their votes between. A bigger field wasn’t a reflection of “where the base was” if more candidates supporting a position made it less likely to win.

Say someone else takes the visual result of the font’s output and re-posts it as plain text.

If anyone searches for that text, their version will come up as the first (and only) published version. Anyone who tries to reference it will cite their version instead of yours. You’d have to convince the court that a clearly different text you published earlier is really the same thing, as long as you view it with a special font that magically transforms it into the text you’re trying to claim—the judge would just as likely think you’re a copyright troll.

If the underlying text says one thing but the font makes it appear to say something else, which version does the author own the copyright to?

The plan was never to target criminals, it was to criminalize the targeted.

How does he envisage surface-to-air missiles being used against him by current allies? Defending Greenland from a US invasion?

I agree with the goal… but while I think a competitive primary leads to better outcomes, too many candidates leads to arbitrary outcomes that depend more on which factions have the lowest candidate-to-voter ratio instead of which have the most actual voters (at least the way it’s currently structured). Plus it increases the chances of a brokered convention, which leads to voters feeling disenfranchised no matter who wins.