NOT Marie Curie :(

Your resident biologist (not really quite yet but SOON) They/them

[violintbiologist]

what is the power house of the cell?

The mitochondria which perform oxidative phosphorylation (a part of aerobic respiration which uses oxygen) to generate ATP! Most eukaryotic cells contain mitochondria, and for good reason, because ATP is a great source of chemical energy. The mitochondria are a big component of the endosymbiotic theory; the theory that organelles such as the mitochondria and chloroplast arose from being tiny free living prokaryotic cells that could perform aerobic respiration and photosynthesis (respectively) taken in by a eukaryotic predecessor who found their characteristics useful and decided not to eat them!

[thoughtlessarse]

UN warns planet is ‘in a state of emergency’ as global heat levels hit record high

A UN report found that the last 11 years were the hottest on record, with impacts set to last for centuries.

The amount of heat trapped by the Earth reached record levels in 2025, with the consequences of such warming feared to last for thousands of years, the UN has warned. The 11 hottest years ever recorded were all between 2015 and 2025, the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed in its flagship State of the Global Climate annual report. Last year was the second or third hottest year on record, at about 1.43 degrees above the 1850-1900 average, the WMO said. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said of the report that the global climate “is in a state of emergency”. “Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits. Every key climate indicator is flashing red,” Guterres said. “Humanity has just endured the 11 hottest years on record. When history repeats itself 11 times, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a call to act.” For the first time, the WMO climate report includes the planet’s energy imbalance, the rate at which energy enters and leaves the Earth system. Under a stable climate, incoming energy from the Sun is about the same as the amount of outgoing energy, the Geneva-based agency said. However the increase in concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) “to their highest level in at least 800,000 years” has “upset this equilibrium”, the WMO said. “The Earth’s energy imbalance has increased since its observational record began in 1960, particularly in the past 20 years. It reached a new high in 2025.”

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[violintbiologist]

What's one of your favourite plant facts

Oooooo I have so many!! I think my favourite has to be that since venus flytraps... trap... flies... their flowers have to grow so high up away from the rest of the plant so that their pollinators don't get eaten by the trap. I know this because of Hank Green and because every. single. plant biology class talks about it. Because it's so smart!

Don't they just look so weird and funky and cool?

[violintbiologist]

The really quite unfortunate cuteness problem

I think it's safe to say that everybody knows about how giant pandas are at risk, but have you ever heard of the Yangtze river dolphin? No? Well, both were going extinct, but in 2006 while us regular people were donating money to save the giant panda, the Yangtze river dolphin was quietly slipping away in the wild, and was declared functionally extinct (meaning they are still found in nature reserves but not in the wild) that same year. Plants are completely out of the question in terms of cuteness conservation. Did you know that 71% of all cycads are considered threatened with extinction? 34% of conifers? Whole ecosystems could crash and burn because of our lackadaisical efforts. All this preamble to say, us humans have a problem. And our problem is that we are 100% biased towards saving what we deem cute animals, or, in conservation terms, poster species - whales, pandas, polar bears, elephants, and the like. My ecology professor brought up a great point when she said poster animals can be useful to bring in donations for broader wildlife conservation funding, but what if there's so little public knowledge about these species that they can't even attract the funding from these larger organizations? What about ugly reptiles? Amphibians? Who's going to eat all the horseflies and mosquitoes? Even then, those species eating bugs that we find annoying are still useful to us, whereas species that may be useful to their habitat at large go completely unnoticed and go extinct quietly into the night.