Other research teams are working on lettuce that wilts more slowly, bruise-resistant apples and potatoes and identifying the genes that determine how quickly grapes and blueberries shrivel.
Pro tip: Buy your grapes, take them home, rinse them and promptly remove them from the vine. They will last up to a week in the fridge if the plant they grew on isn't desperately trying to stay alive longer with zero hope of survival by feeding on the grapes.
What do you mean you don't buy grapes and then just eat all of them in one go? Interesting tip though, I know a fair bit about plants and gardening, yet this idea never occurred to me.
“If forty thousand dollars of student loan debt paid for anything, it’s to be able to eat chocolate chip cookies again,” he says.
That's sort of how I felt about my student loan. Doctors who didn't take me seriously as a mostly bedridden homemaker went full nuclear and put me on like 8 or 9 prescription drugs when I told one "I took out a student loan for this summer program. I cannot afford to drop out."
"Survival of the fittest" means "whatever doesn't die, wins."
First you need things capable of not dying in x circumstances. After adversity kills everything else, you have the "winners."
This will incline species to develop tolerance over time, usually several generations. Human caused climate change is happening on a timescale that isn't very supportive of that process.
RIGHT NOW there are coral that are already heat resistant. When the ocean temperature rises, the corals that can’t tolerate it will die off and the ones that can tolerate will survive. Then because of less resources being used by those that died, the coral with heat tolerance will thrive. This is how evolution works.
At least some corals must be able to survive the current transformation? At least some past extinction events must've been very abrupt and things like corals lived through that?
Supposedly one past extinction event killed off all dinosaurs, leaving rats and other small mammals to take over the world.
Dragonflies used to have like two foot or four foot wings spans. Now their relatively small and presumably play a very different role in the ecosystem.
Mother Nature isn't some Christian God that loves you and looks out for you. The fact that nature isn't looking out for our welfare is likely why things like Christianity are popular: Because actual reality scares the hell out of people and they need some kind of emotional opiate so they can go "La la la not listening!" and get through the damn day.
It really depends on a lot of factors but I generally agree that many people vastly overestimate the time savings of taking a car.
And that's before we get into questions like "How many of your hours of paid work are required to make car payments, insurance payments, tag, title and maintenance?"
I wish public transit served homeless people as well as a lot of folks like to imagine it does.
A lot of homeless aren't "transients." They aren't just passing through.
If we had excellent public transit to make it easier for homeless people to travel at will, maybe they would be. And maybe their lives would be overall better and they would get less open hatred for being poor and unhoused in a world making it increasingly challenging to get housing for far too many people.
In the same spirit, I never really associate the meaning of "transient" as "someone passing through," rather it's just a word for "homeless person" for me.
It's not really that small and I don't know why people say that.
Last time I saw stats, it was five million monthly visitors. It's small as a platform. It's smaller than Reddit or Facebook, but those aren't discussion communities.
There aren't huge numbers of subreddits larger than five million people and last I looked the largest tended to be about trivial BS.
Last I checked, HN is the largest serious tech discussion board on the planet.
I've gotten traffic from HN and /r/programming, and the influx from HN is larger. I think it's a function of two things. First, /r/programming is higher-volume (i.e., more front-page links per day). Second, Reddit subscriber counts are not DAU / MAU, it likely includes a ton of inactive accounts.
Funny I just looked and Reddit says r/programming is 4.1m which last I checked is less than the 5 million unique visitors HN was getting a few years ago when I last saw stats by the moderator and I don't know what it's at now.
Twitter works completely differently from most platforms and isn't a unified community.
Pro tip: Buy your grapes, take them home, rinse them and promptly remove them from the vine. They will last up to a week in the fridge if the plant they grew on isn't desperately trying to stay alive longer with zero hope of survival by feeding on the grapes.