As Alex noted, apple seeds contain cyanide, or to be more accurate, cyanogenic glycosides. When the tissue of most apple seeds is damaged, an enzyme cleaves the sugar-cyanide bond, releasing hydrogen cyanide gas. You can test this yourself, by crushing some apple seeds and smelling the mashed seeds. It will smell of almonds, which is the smell of hydrogen cyanide gas.

I created a lab for intro biology around testing for HCN in various plant tissues. The interesting thing is not all apple seeds actually seem to produce HCN. Granny Smith seeds seem to always produce it (and relatively speaking a lot), while some little lunch box sized Fuji apples I bought at a farmers market don't produce any at all.

It seems like the idea is that we get more fuel efficient tires but at the price of having tires that wear out more quickly? That seems like a pretty lousy proposition, especially when you factor in externalities like all the micro-particle pollution that tires produce and the chronic health effects they can cause.

Its serial nature also means that an evaluator's standards can drift from students with early exams to those with later exams. Oral exams can introduce issues of sex and ethnic biasing.

Or just regular personal biasing, which is just as unfair but doesn’t receive government protection even in theory.

Evaluation drift happens with written exams too. They are graded serially.

Maybe they are painting the fish and find the experience unenjoyable? :)

The worst thing that ever happened to Common Lisp was its ANSI standardization, which for many years killed almost all language innovation and improvement.

On the other hand, standardization enabled Common Lisp implementations to actually be tested, so programs became much more portable across time and between different implementations.

What stopped further development of the standard was the collapse of the market for Common Lisp.

I should note that many of the things that need changes to the language definition in other languages are just libraries in Common Lisp.

Nobody stopped anyone to come up with variants, just from calling those ANSI Common Lisp compliant. There are after all many, most of which are long dead already.

The worst and best thing.

But _worse is better_.

Bring. Back. Aperture!!! Yes there are alternative to Lightroom out there (Capture One, for example), but Aperture was so Mac native and was such a joy to use on OS X.

Aperture (RIP) is never coming back, but many of us Aperature fans have been happily using Nitro¹, built by the guy who led Aperture and other imaging teams at Apple².

¹ https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-for-macos/index.html ² https://www.gentlemencoders.com/about/

Wandering spiders do not feed on banana sap. They hunt small invertebrates on the forest floor at night and hide among bananas, or other dark and protected locations during the day. The defensive posture you described is one way to help identify them.

It turns out that Phoneutria defensive bites are most often "dry" with little if any venom. It's thought that the spiders conserve venom for use on actual prey items.

BTW, the four frontal eyes in a box is not considered a good taxonomic character for IDing them, as spiders in other related genera also have this. They do have a warning posture, but not a "dance" that I am aware of. Also, they are terrestrial and hunt on the forest floor. The stories of them "jumping" are largely exaggerated.

First of all, thanks for your interesting contribution.

Is a good taxonomic character if you are in Europe, as no European spider, big or small, has this eyes.

Also this is a fast way to discard other tropical spiders that could also appear on orders of imported fresh fruit and have a fearsome look but are harmless.

Tarantulas have small eyes arranged like a bowtie. Huntsmans have four eyes in a line. If you are bitten by a spider that is hairy, bigger than 10cm, and does have eyes arranged like those, is just a pinch, painful but safer than a mosquito bite. Just wash it with soap. Same if the eyes are arranged in a square but two are much bigger than the other two. Safe.

Otherwise.

If you are bitten by a cream hairy spider that has only "3 eyes", one central and two laterals (really 6 in 3 pairs) is a Sicariidae, go to a doctor.

If it has four eyes of the same size arranged in a square be cautious. If it has a middle groove in the rear part of the torax is a Ctenidae, so may be dangerous. As Phoneutria is the most common Ctenidae found in banana bunches, and as we can't discard still that every other genus on the family aren't poisonous, play safe and go to an hospital. If is a harmless related species only they can identify it, and if not you are in the correct place. They can evaluate if is a dry bite and can stabilize you and provide treatment if is not.

The other spiders that are really concerning, the Australian Atrax and Mouse spiders and the black widows are much smaller, 1-5cm, not really hairy and glossy black with red or white marks. They are mostly terrestrial.

If you have not crushed yet the spider, you may need to take a good photo from some distance. Is easier if you trap it before on a glass jar, as long as you can do it safely. If in doubt assure to bring the dead spider with you, so the doctor can see it under a microscope.

Lot of excellent information. Thanks. I'm glad someone out there doesn't have arachnophobia. I'm also glad it's not me.

The people training the model are almost certainly not the same ones writing tweets. I don't know why that is mind boggling. We all make typos, at least the humans among us do.