In the reductionistic approach that dominates science, we've tried to categorize even our own physiology into sperate systems such as the immune system or the metabolic system. A number of beautiful papers show that things are not so segmented as we might think. A thread.

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The calamoid palms 🌴 have over 500 species spread across the world, but their higher-level relationships were a bit of a mystery. Until now.

Out today in #MolecularPhylogeneticsAndEvolution:

A robust phylogenomic framework for the calamoid palms https://t.co/JiCbSUlheH

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First some background info, so that you know what we are talking about:

Calamoid palms look a bit like snakes 🐍 (don't they!?!), because their fruits are covered in overlapping scales. And with their often fierce spines, they are equally fearsome. 😱

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They are classified into 17 genera, 10 subtribes and 3 tribes. They have an amazing variety of growth forms, from stemless to climbing to tree habit. 🌱🌴

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But as I said, their relationships have been a bit of a mystery. Here's the varying relationships previous studies found over the last 20 years.

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We tackled this mystery with a phylogenomic approach: we sampled almost a thousand genes (a hundred times more than previous studies!) of 75 species representing all calamoid tribes, subtribes and genera.

The resulting data matrix is pretty massive...

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A Thread about Famous Armenian Inventors and what we have contributed to the world. So the next time someone wants to say we are unimportant, you can rest easy knowing Armenians have contributed some of the greatest inventions to mankind. Here is a handful but there's more.

Raymond Damadian: Armenian-American Physician and inventor of the first MRI machine. MRI is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to form pictures of the anatomy and the physiological processes of the body. Raymond created the first MRI in 1977.

Artem Mikoyan: One of the most famous engineers in aviation. Mikoyan along with Gurevich created one of the most famous Jet lines in history, the MiG. MiG jets directly competed with American Lockheed Martin F Series planes and were among the first to surpass the speed of sound.

Hovannes Adamian: Most notably laid the foundations of color television with his Tri-Color Principle. His work would go on to become the framework that is used to create Color-TV that we see today. He is recognized as one of the founders of color television.

Emik Avakian: An inventor who unfortunately was disabled, but that didn't stop him from contributing work that would help people similar to his condition. Notable contributions are the automatic wheelchair which dismiss the action of hand rolling and a breath operated typewriter.