this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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Science Memes

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Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



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[–] ch00f@lemmy.world 185 points 1 week ago (11 children)

When Newton worked out the laws of motion, he figured they had to be correct because they were so simple and elegant.

He had no idea that relativity was going to come in and fuck his shit up.

[–] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 75 points 1 week ago (3 children)

And then there was quantum.

[–] elvith@feddit.org 88 points 1 week ago

Do you have any idea how fast you were going?

No officer, but I can tell you exactly where I am!

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Which is also simple and elegant

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[–] ragingHungryPanda@piefed.keyboardvagabond.com 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

He did also notice that the planets didn't move quite exactly as he predicted and said "well, God must keep them in place"

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[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

TBF the laws of motion are still correct.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 53 points 1 week ago

it's not that they are "correct", it's that they are a close enough approximation to work well enough at the scale they're used. it's not like the universe runs on math.

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[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 127 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] skisnow@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A lot of problems in the world can be attributed to people who think "if I don't understand something, it must be because the experts saying it are all wrong".

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[–] CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 121 points 1 week ago (5 children)

A genderino sounds more like something you'd find in particle physics than biology anyway

[–] BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org 38 points 1 week ago

Considering the names of the types of quarks, I recommend renaming them genderinos.

[–] KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 21 points 1 week ago

finally, we found what genderfluid is made from

[–] Una@europe.pub 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Physicists are freaky, like who was out there going and asking quarks what is their power dynamic in sex?

[–] jimmux@programming.dev 28 points 1 week ago (2 children)

"I'm a charm in the streets, and a strange in the sheets."

[–] piranhaconda@mander.xyz 16 points 1 week ago

I'm down for a strap on, but what is a glue on??

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[–] gaybriel_fr_br@jlai.lu 11 points 1 week ago

Right alongside gender fluid.

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[–] serenissi@lemmy.world 119 points 1 week ago (18 children)

though the meme is cool, gender isn't particularly a biology (or 'advance biology') thing. biology deals with sexes, their expressions and functionalities. gender is more of a personal and social concept but often related to sex characteristics (cis).

and yes, advanced biology tells sex determination isn't as easy as XX or XY or even looking at genitals like a creep.

and oh, for giggles consider fungi :)

[–] oyfrog@lemmy.world 77 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Adding to this: XX and XY works for mammals, but not for other vertebrates (fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians). Birds and reptiles have Z and W chromosomes, and unlike in mammals where females are homozygotes, males in these groups are homozygotes. Some reptiles have temperature dependent sex determination, where ambient temperature above some value will produce males or females (depends on species). Some reptiles are composed entirely of females.

Some fish will straight up change sexes depending on age and male-female ratio in a social group.

In other groups it's not even different chromosomes but simply copy number of specific genes.

Plants can do all sorts of whacky things like produce seeds and pollen in the same individual.

Fungi are an entirely different cluster fuck because they have mating types which are not simple binaries.

Eukaryotic sex determination isn't a binary and it isn't even a nicely categorizable spectrum. It's a grab-bag of whatever doesn't perma-fuck your genome.

Source: me, I'm a biologist. Though admittedly I work on animals so my understanding of fungi and plant stuff is fuzzy at best.

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[–] AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 41 points 1 week ago (6 children)

https://xkcd.com/435/

I would say gender is probably centered about around psychology, ranges mostly from sociology to biology, with a just little bit going into chemistry

maybe like

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[–] YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 26 points 1 week ago

Slime mold(which is not a mold or fungi) looks around nervously in it's 13 different sexes.

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[–] affiliate@lemmy.world 104 points 1 week ago (12 children)

i think that if more people were exposed to advanced math there would be a reactionary trend of people going around and asking mathematicians “what is a number?”

[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 35 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

sort of like the reactionary trend of pulling your kids out of school because Common Core has changed how math is taught so critical thinking and conceptual understanding is incorporated, rather than teaching math by rote memorization?

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[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I believe that's what happens anytime they say that we probably shouldn't focus on memorizing a multiplication table, or try to teach anything in a way that puts more focus on understanding how numbers work than on symbolic memorization.
And that's like... Elementary school.

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[–] ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 104 points 1 week ago (6 children)

I'm a career physicist, and I honestly have no idea what a state of matter is anymore.

[–] la508@lemmy.world 40 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Can I offer you a nice smectic B3 liquid crystal in this trying time?

[–] MycelialMass@lemmy.world 25 points 1 week ago

You may not.

[–] axont@hexbear.net 26 points 1 week ago (2 children)

yeah i have a bachelor's in chemistry and I remember a professor earnestly saying the phrase "metallic phase nitrogen" and I think I went home and stared at the ceiling for an hour

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An abstraction used for grouping kinds of things together for the purposes of making thinking about them a lot faster.

[–] nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I would wager you have more of an idea of what a state of matter is than biologists do of what a species is. Humans like to put things into neat boxes but nature is under no deal obligation to cooperate.

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[–] HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Simple, "solid state" means "no moving parts", like a vacuum tube, for example.

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[–] gjoel@programming.dev 64 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Honestly, people would probably object more to advanced math than advanced biology if they were exposed as much to it. Or basic math. Or elementary math...

[–] fossilesque@mander.xyz 52 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Math is extremely irrational.

[–] Opisek@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Math is not real sometimes. Imaginary, even.

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[–] Gutek8134@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)
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[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I can confirm. My partner does math professionally and sometimes she tells me things about her field that are just plain unnatural. And I’m a pretty open-minded person.

[–] Rozz@lemmy.sdf.org 38 points 1 week ago

If certain people could almost understand they would be very upset

[–] undergroundoverground@lemmy.world 29 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

So true and it's a great to remind them of that sort of thing.

You know, you'd think all of the people who say it's purely down to genetics would be natural allies with, you know, molecular biologists (applied genetics). They'd be all like "it's a Y chromosome or nothing" and the biologists would be all like "yeah chromosomes!" because we fucking love chromosomes but no. In fact, it's noticeably absent when you start to think about it.

I wonder why that might be?

The short answer is "because it's infinitely more complicated than that."

Just because you carry the genetic code for anything at all, it doesn't mean you'll express it. The default setting for our DNA is off. So, if something isn't telling it to transcribe, it won't do it. A whole load of reasons could cause that, even before we get to mutations and partial expression or chimeras etc.

Anyway, what i mean is yeah, this meme!

Edit: also, don't beleive the AI. Early fetuses are female, until the Y is activated. You could have an inactivated Y and the fetus could be a woman capable of having children. The default setting is female, not intersex. It could be either but unless a specific event happens, it will always be female. It's a subtle but important difference. This means that all fetuses are female and then turn into a male.

[–] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Bigot: "trans people aren't natrual according to science!!"

Scientist: "we've learned that trans people are natrual and this has helped us broaden our understanding of gender and human psychology"

Bigot: "stfu!! >:c

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[–] k4gie@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago (14 children)

Do the two tails left of M and right of F mean there are males more male than cis males, and similarly with females?

[–] outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 42 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Yes, hyperreal genders do exist, but are not stable outside lab conditions.

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[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 22 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (8 children)

The peaks do not designate "cis", you can be cis and fall anywhere on the chart - being cis is about the sex you were arbitrarily assigned at birth (and whether that assignment aligns or conflicts with your actual gender identity).

And when doctors change assignments, it's really unclear whether you're cis or not if you transition - e.g. a baby assigned female at birth who is then weeks later assigned male at birth later transitions to be a girl, she was originally assigned female at birth - is she trans or cis?

Instead the peaks represent the most common combination of male and female sex traits in humans, with the slopes representing less common combinations of traits, e.g. to the left of the male peak might be men who experience excessive androgenization like lots of body hair, maybe precocious puberty, early balding, and so on (more male traits than average).

This chart as a model of sex actually doesn't make much sense, since sex has been redefined in light of how complex sex is and the differences in sexual development that occur.

Where on the chart would we put someone with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS)? With CAIS a person is born with XY chromosomes and thus has a typical male karyotype, but their androgen receptors do not respond to androgens, so none of the masculinization is able to occur - leading the person to look, develop, and usually live as a woman.

The chart implies a spectrum, when the reality of biological sex is much more complex than a simple spectrum would allow - more like a constellation. Each sex differentiated trait is an axis / spectrum of its own, and there are thousands of ways differentiation can happen.

EDIT: oh, and to answer your question, it sounds like your question is really whether the peaks on a bimodal distribution represent a smaller number than the tails in aggregate, and the answer is that it depends on how you select your aggregates and how much of the peak you lump together. I think the entire point of the bimodal distribution, though, is to show that the majority fall on the peaks while the tails represent a minority.

That said, a MRI study found that when examining brain sex, >90% of people (mostly cis) were not able to be classed as having fully male or female brains, so realistically I think it's fair to say most people are sexually divergent in some way.

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[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago

Well, clearly. If you define a male characteristic as something that's more common in men than in women and vice-versa, then e.g. being tall would be a "male characteristic".

Height isn't a binary thing with men being exactly Xcm tall and women exactly Ycm, so there's people who have more of said male characteristic and people who have less. And you also have women who have more of this characteristic and some men (e.g. there are some women that are taller than some men).

The same can be done for every characteristic that's associated with a gender. Genitals are on a spectrum (large clitoris vs micropenis), fat distribution is on a spectrum (e.g. there are men with breasts and women without), body hair is on a spectrum, hormone distribution is on a spectrum and so on and so on.

If you take a lot of characteristics at once it becomes clear in most cases whether the person you are dealing with is a man or a woman (though there are some where that's more difficult or impossible), but if you take just a single characteristic (e.g. height) it's impossible to say whether the person you are dealing with is definitively a man or a woman.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don't think it's an accepted term anymore, but you reminded me that they used to call the triple X chromosome syndrome by the term Super-Female-Syndrome.

Probably not what the author intended though.

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[–] m8052@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (9 children)

Sqrt(-1) is still wrong tho. I'm commuting a sin by writting it. Correct expression is i^2=-1

[–] rudyharrelson@lemmy.radio 23 points 1 week ago (10 children)

Wolfram tells me sqrt(-1) = i and it hasn't lied to me yet.

In what meaningful way is i^2 = -1 different from sqrt(-1) = i?

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 16 points 1 week ago (2 children)

sqrt(-1) = ±i. The negative answer is also valid.

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