There’s a type of bacteria that infects caterpillars and produces a toxin that makes them lose all rigidity. The toxin is called MCF.
MCF stand for Makes Caterpillars Floppy
oh man you really don’t want a flaccid caterpillar, total mood killer
That’s the best thing I’ve heard all week.
To be honest, love the “Ferrous Wheel” pun. It’s too good.
Can you explain it? I don’t get it.
Ferrous means iron. When they say Ferrous wheel, it means how the iron is stored and used in the biosphere and lithosphere. It is a pun on Ferris Wheel, which is an amusement park ride.
Half a byte being a nibble is too cute to hate.
There was an early trend of giving tech stuff fantasy terms, too. Programs that do something for the user being wizards and programs that do things when triggered being daemons, for instance.
Player characters and profile pictures are called “avatars” after Hindu mythology. It is the physical embodiment of a divine being on a lesser plane.
Not exactly the same but I remember starting my software engineering course and having to remote into the university servers to write code. All the servers were named after Red Dwarf characters. Being a career changer, as soon as I saw the server names I had this calming feeling that I’d finally found my people and everything was going to be ok.
My dad was never at university, but he was a unix admin for ages. his naming conventions for clusters?
Star Wars characters.
Red Dwarf Characters.
Star trek characters.
Asimov’s robots.
and apparently, his annoying bosses. (For the troublesome clusters.)
scientists work their asses off, its nice to have a little fun and make the endless hours all worth it.
The predicted outcomes of sinus surgery for chronic rhinosinusitis may use the SNOT scale (sinonasal outcome test)
These are hilarious. I NEED MORE!
there is a species of mushrooms named Spongiforma Squarepantsii.
there is a beetle named Agra vation
a spider named Apopyllus now
apparently, a sea slug Yoda purpurata. (but I don’t see the resemblance.)
and a waterbug named Ytu Brutus,
(compliments to ChatGPT…lol)
Same lol
there’s also a protein involved in visual signals in the brain named Pikachurin,
there’s a wasp in austrialia named Aha ha,
(again, chatgpt sourcing… but I did check to make sure they’re real… lols)
Meanwhile psychologists just name things as exactly blandly as they can. There’s a neat phenomenon where a relationship can immediately be viewed as deeper and more connected, merely by one of the individuals sharing deeply personal information. It even works at the very first interaction. In other words, if someone tends to overshare, or blurt out info about themselves, we measure their blirtasiousness and its effect on relationships. Not even kidding. I think the folks who came up with it were Scottish, which is why the blirt rather than blurt.
1/4 of a byte, or half of a nibble, is a crumb.
Thanks for giving us your two bits
To be fair, that was coined by Larson and then adopted by the scientists, whereas the previous examples were coined by those in the field, specifically.
There’s always NMR scientists. Proton-Enhanced Nuclear Induction Spectroscopy.
Also one paper that was talking about copper nanotubes (NT). So it was shortened to CuNT. I think that paper may have been oblivious to it though?
I’ll just leave this here
Nah, it’s good and helps people remember things. Easier than the arbitrary name of the discoverer
Meanwhile, in immunology:
“Can we have fun names?”
“NO! Now shut up and keep isolating proteins and cell markers!”
The stupid terminology in immunology made me hate it so much, even though the actual mechanics are fascinating. At some point my brain just reached saturation with all the CD proteins. Enough is enough!!!
