The mystery behind how birds navigate might finally be solved: it's not the iron in their beaks providing a magnetic compass, but a protein in their eyes that lets them "see" Earth's magnetic fields.
These findings come courtesy of two papers - one studying robins, the other zebra finches.
The fancy eye protein is called Cry4, and it's part of a class of proteins called cryptochromes - photoreceptors sensitive to blue light, found in both plants and animals. These proteins play a role in regulating circadian rhythms.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 02 2018, @11:31PM (3 children)
The problem is that it's a euphemism treadmill.
Changing the name of the thing does nothing to change the stigma attached to the thing.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Monday September 03 2018, @07:07AM (2 children)
Well, to a certain extent, that is one of the ways that language evolves. It used to be that imbecile, idiot, moron, feeble-minded were all terms used by the medical community [wikipedia.org].
It is an interesting exercise (for small values of interesting) to try and work out a noun for 'toilet' that isn't a euphemism. The best I could find was the Australian word dunny [wiktionary.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 03 2018, @09:38AM (1 child)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shitter#Etymology_1 [wiktionary.org]
See also: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Thesaurus:toilet [wiktionary.org]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday September 04 2018, @01:07PM
Shit most probably comes from the Proto-Indo-European *sḱeyd-, *skeyd- (“to split, divide, separate”) [wiktionary.org], as your link shows. The thesaurus link gives all euphemisms of one type or another, with the possible exception of 'pisser', which would be a urinal rather than somewhere where you shit. It seems to be a weird cultural thing that the place where you shit is referred to by euphemism piled upon euphemism, with older euphemisms regarded as 'indelicate'.