I never forget the rooster running around the pole with no head for like a minute or so.

Imagine the view you see as a head rolls off the guillotine to the ground in the last 5 seconds of your existence.  
And End Scene 

 GeneP59 wrote:
Simple picture: Imagine your dick propelling you through space.

I don’t want a 20 page explanation. I want pretty pictures for my mind to comprehend. Just cutting out the middle man and absorbing information directly into my cerebral cortex.

This is the path to our next plane of existence.

What Physical ‘Life Force’ Turns Biology’s Wheels?
The bacterial flagellar motor is finally understood after 50 years. In its workings, columnist Natalie Wolchover finds the essence of life.

(...) Evolution has created the flagellar motor, a combination propeller/brain that enables single-celled bacteria to move toward food sources. It’s an electric motor that rotates at several hundred revolutions per second — faster than the flywheel in a race car engine — to twirl a tail-like flagellum that pushes the cell along. When the flagellar motor rotates counterclockwise, it propels the cell through the water 10 or more times its own length in a second. The motor can also rotate clockwise, causing the cell to tumble about randomly. This amazing, self-assembling, signal-processing, direction-switching molecular machine is so powerful yet so spare that, billions of years later, it’s still used by bacteria in virtually every gut and puddle on Earth.

Since the discovery of the bacterial flagellar motor in the 1970s, biologists and creationists alike have marveled at its design like medieval architects staring with awe at the dome of the Pantheon built by their Roman ancestors. It’s hard to fathom the level of engineering achievable by a billion years of bacterial evolution, especially with only 20 minutes between cell generations, which allows for a truly astronomical number of mutations and trial runs. Creationists hold up the bacterial flagellar motor as a prime example of intelligent design — specifically the concept of “irreducible complexity,” a biological system so intricate, they say, that it couldn’t possibly have arisen in stages through the gradual, stepwise process of Darwinian evolution.

Yet it very much did.

Over the past few decades, scientists have toiled to unravel how the flagellar motor works — namely, how it rotates and switches directions.

Now they finally have. A wave of studies since 2020 has cracked the molecular structures of the flagellar motor’s parts, including, most importantly, the small cogwheels that turn the larger cogwheel at the flagellum’s base. The final pieces of this dynamic puzzle fell into place as recently as March 2026. (...)

An Early Miocene ape from the biogeographic crossroads of African and Eurasian Hominoidea

Great Apes Joke Around, Suggesting Humor Is Older Than Humans
Studies of great apes hint at why and when clowning behavior evolved

Orangutans and humans are both great apes, along with chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas. Members of this group have many things in common. We have big brains and long childhoods. We laugh, mourn, get jealous and hold grudges. We recognize ourselves in mirrors and understand that others can know things we don’t. Great apes have well-developed social intelligence; we’re very interested in other individuals, and we spend a lot of time playing with, learning from, fighting over, getting even with, and befriending them. Could playful teasing have evolved as part of this intense interest in the goals, feelings and relationships of others?

Why the ‘missing link’ fossil was almost missed
One of the 20th-century's biggest quests was to find the “missing link,” a being who connected humans to their pre-historic ancestors. It was also the height of scientific racism.

Early Humans Left Africa Much Earlier Than Previously Thought
Scientists have found evidence of several waves of migration by looking at the genetic signatures of human interbreeding with Neanderthals.

Dr. Paabo’s team also discovered that living, non-African people carry fragments of Neanderthal DNA, a signature of interbreeding from long ago. In May, a team of researchers estimated that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred during a short period of time, between 47,000 and 40,000 years ago.

But some Neanderthal DNA does not fit into this neat picture. The Neanderthal Y chromosome, for example, is more similar to the Y chromosome found in living humans than it is to the rest of the Neanderthal genome.

In 2020, researchers offered an explanation: Neanderthal males inherited a new Y chromosome from humans between 370,000 and 100,000 years ago. But that would have made sense only if a wave of Africans had expanded out of the continent much earlier than scientists had thought.

Researchers have recently found evidence for such an early wave in the genomes of living Africans.

Dr. Tishkoff and her colleagues compared the genome of a 122,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil with the genomes of 180 people from 12 populations across Africa. Previous studies had found no sign of Neanderthal DNA in African genomes. But Dr. Tishkoff’s group detected tiny pieces of Neanderthal-like DNA scattered across all 12 of the populations they studied.

When they examined the size and sequence of those genetic fragments, they concluded that Neanderthals inherited them from early Africans. That meant an early wave of Africans expanded into Europe or Asia about 250,000 years ago and interbred with Neanderthals.

Scientists generate the first complete chromosome sequences from non-human primates
Complete X and Y chromosome sequences from six primate species reveal species diversity and insights into evolution.

A team of researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have generated the first complete chromosome sequences from non-human primates. Published in Nature, these sequences uncover remarkable variation between the Y chromosomes of different species, showing rapid evolution, in addition to revealing previously unstudied regions of great ape genomes. Since these primate species are the closest living relatives to humans, the new sequences can provide insights into human evolution.

The researchers focused on the X and Y chromosomes, which play roles in sexual development and fertility, among many other biological functions. They sequenced chromosomes from five great ape species, chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla and Bornean and Sumatran orangutans, as well as one other primate species that is more distantly related to humans, the siamang gibbon. (...)

The researchers found that over 90% of the ape X chromosome sequences aligned to the human X chromosome, showing that the X chromosomes have remained relatively unchanged over millions of years of evolution. However, only 14% to 27% of the ape Y chromosome sequences aligned to the human Y chromosome. (...)

Meet the man who has transformed our understanding of evolution
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Canadian evolutionary biologist Dolph Schluter the prestigious Crafoord Prize for his work on the mechanics of evolution, which has fundamentally changed our understanding of how the tree of life branches out.

 miamizsun wrote:

What's that AI smokin'?

some get stoned
some get strange
sooner or later we all walk on

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Svante Pääbo on Monday for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominids and human evolution. (...)

“Through his pioneering research, Svante Pääbo — this year’s Nobel Prize laureate in physiology or medicine — accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans,” the Nobel committee said in a statement.

“Pääbo’s discoveries have generated new understanding of our evolutionary history,” the statement said, adding that this research had helped establish the burgeoning science of “paleogenomics,” or the study of genetic material from ancient pathogens.

How Much Do Your Genes Shape Your Politics? *
They’re not everything, but they’re not nothing, either.

Meet the man who can explain the first 3 billion years of life on our planet

Omicron’s Radical Evolution*
Thirteen of Omicron’s mutations should have hurt the variant’s chances of survival. Instead, they worked together to make it thrive.

Most Detailed Tree of Life Ever Made That You Can Actually Explore!

www.onezoom.org