Student’s Corner
Humour
A joke that collapses when you know the science was never a biology joke. These are required to remain standing.
Read the line, then the note. If the note surprises you, the essay to reopen is linked from profound concepts or the experiments.
The power bill
The mitochondrion walks into the cell. The nucleus says, “We need to talk about the power bill.”
Textbooks reduced mitochondria to a slogan about power. What they actually do is more precise: electron transport pumps protons, and ATP synthase lets those protons back in a way that makes ATP. The joke survives. The slogan should not be your whole answer.
Overnight shipping
Someone asked the Golgi apparatus for overnight shipping. It said it handles vesicles, not promises.
The Golgi modifies and sorts proteins and sends them on in vesicles. It is not a logistics company with a clock. Transit times are a measurement, not a motto.
The gym
A poster at the gym says “survival of the fittest.” The fern outside is not deadlifting, and it is doing rather well.
Herbert Spencer’s phrase misleads. Fitness is reproductive success in a stated environment. A shaded understory, a drought, or a crowded Petri dish each crown a different kind of success.
Now you do
A bacterium walks into a bar. The bartender says, “We don’t serve your type.” The bacterium divides. “Now you do.”
Binary fission doubles a population when resources allow. The doubling does not continue forever. Carrying capacity is the part of the joke the bartender would tell an hour later.
The lichen
Why did the lichen refuse to break up? It said the relationship was symbiotic and, frankly, composite.
A lichen is a fungus living with a photosynthetic partner, alga or cyanobacterium, not a single plant. Newer work finds still more microbial partners. The punchline is the textbook version; the real association is even less like one organism.
Too rough
The endoplasmic reticulum tried to tell a joke and was told it was too rough.
Rough ER is studded with ribosomes and makes proteins that enter the secretory path. Smooth ER lacks those ribosomes and handles lipids and detoxification. The pun is only funny if the difference is real. It is.
The forest
Asked to list the life in a forest, a student named twelve animals and forgot the forest.
Botanists James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler called this habit plant blindness. A woodland is not a stage set for vertebrates. If your species count has no plants, fungi, or microbes, you have not yet started the list.
Running in circles
The Krebs cycle’s diary: “Ran in a circle again. Somehow produced something.”
The cycle regenerates its own oxaloacetate. The point is not the circle as exercise. Carbon dioxide leaves, and electrons are carried by NADH and FADH2 toward the respiratory chain. The diary is funny. The stoichiometry is the lesson.