Spyke

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europe

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Merz’s party vows to clamp down on Germany’s ‘lifestyle part-time work’

I'm technically one of these "lifestyle" part-timers, at 35 instead of 40 hours a week. This reduction has had a noticeable impact on my mental health, to the point where I'd dare say my productivity hasn't changed one bit.

But let's be real: I cannot imagine that even Blackrockfritze believes that economic growth is determined by having longer working hours. This is a deliberate attempt to create another group of "lazy people" to lay the blame for the utter incompetence of his government.

europe

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Germany and France want to extend Arte to the whole of Europe to strengthen the fight against disinformation

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It's not really about art (although you can get some wild art stuff on there), more about culture in general.

It's got a ton of documentaries about all manner of things, movies you'd otherwise only find in arthouse cinemas, concert recordings from classical to hip-hop to death metal.

And it's taxpayer funded (or close enough to it). And it's one of very few cross-border TV station collaborations between public broadcasters in Europe (explicitly made to spread German and French culture across the border), which is pretty cool to begin with.

Check it out: https://www.arte.tv/en/

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Sonic the Rule

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This one is actually a big of a tragic coincidence. A lot of genes are first discovered in a certain type of fruit fly (drosophilia melanogaster), which are excellent for this because of the low amount of gene redundancy and high reproduction rate.

There's a series of genes that cause the fruit fly to have little spikes in their body, making them look a bit like hedgehogs. One of those was jokingly called sonic.

The problem is that this gene is present in humans, too, and has since been linked to severe brain deformities. As you can imagine, telling people that their child has a severe brain defect because of the sonic hedgehog gene is kind of problematic (Which is why it's now commonly only called SHH).

There seem to be newer naming conventions that should prevent this kind of issue in the future.

There's an episode of Let's Learn Everything about this fruit fly: Episode 78