/sci/ - Science & Math

>>4509703
As far as uranium-lead dating goes, that's not necessary.
See, zircon crystals pick up uranium as they form, but not lead. If you find zircons with lead in them, it's a safe bet that the lead was originally uranium and decayed over time. By comparing the concentrations of uranium remaining and lead present, you can work out how many half-lives have passed since the crystal formed. BOOSH.

I will grant you that this is difficult to understand. I'm a full-on geo person and I had to look it up for a minute to make sure I explained it properly.

Okay, I'm a hobbyist beekeeper and I know these things. My apologies in advance for the TL;DR.
>>3229544
Honeybees use a haplodiploid sex-determination system; that is, females are diploid (two of each chromosome) and males are haploid (one of each chromosome). Phenotypic gender is a function of gene dosage, not the presence or absence of a certain gene (as in mammals).
The queen, while laying, can choose whether or not an egg is fertilized (becoming diploid, and thus female) or not (remaining haploid, and thus male) by contracting or relaxing a muscle that opens the mouth of the spermatheca, allowing stored sperm to swim into the oviduct and fertilize the egg. The queen decides whether to lay a female egg or a male egg by examining the cell she is laying the egg in; since drones are somewhat larger than workers, bees build some cells slightly larger than others to accommodate them, and it is in these larger cells that the queen lays unfertilized eggs.
Drones have rather different anatomy than workers, lacking the brood food glands necessary to work as nurse bees, the wax glands necessary to build up the hive, the pollen baskets necessary to forage, and the stinger (actually a highly-modified egg-laying organ) necessary to protect the hive. Drones cannot serve any function beyond mating with a new queen.

>>3145300
>implying I was speaking directly to EK when I commented on a certain attribute of a post made by her