Depends on the scale. Really tiny microorganism living in the air do not fly, as in they have no active mecanism to physically interact with their environment to move in any way. They just follow the air currents at seemingly random (the exact word is brownian), kinf of like particles of dust that you see in a ray of light. It is not defined as flying and not studied as such

Yeah I understood after, hence my very fast edit to add the last sentence about flies existing only from around 245 my

Insects fly the same as birds and aeroplanes do, they create air flow around a rounded wing edge, wich causes the air upward of the wing to flow faster than the air under, thus creating a lifting force. And to answer origins, to our knowledge insects were by far the first living flying things, around 300 million years ago with dragonfly relatives. And the group including flies (diptera) came much later, around 240 million years ago !

Pricetag sets expectations, simple as that. It is documented that no matter the product, people have more trust in a more expensive product than a cheaper one, even if they are actually identical. And thus, people also rightfully expect more of a more expensive product. Let’s talk about cars for example : if I buy an old overused small one just to get from point A to point B, I’ll be absolutely satisfied if I paid a few hundred bucks, and absolutely not if I paid a few thousands.

Same with games, if I have a small indie game entertain me somewhat for a few hours, I’ll be super okay if it cost me a few bucks, and super not ok if it cost me 60 or 80 euros. The intrinsic quality may not change, but that was never what was discussed in the first place.

Seconding ready or not, had an absolute blast with it, both solo and coop !

My two cents are the following : avoid irritation as much as you can. This means doing as few passes as you can, if possible shaving somewhat less often, and/or shave less close to the skin, for exemple using an electric trimmer. You should wash beforehand using hot water, and afterwards using cold water, and then dry before moisturising. I personally use and beeswax and olive oil based cream but a lot of products will do the trick. Remember that every skin is different, and sometimes, you can do everything right and still have symptoms, so you should adjust your shaving habits to accommodate those

As others have stated, water in trees gets up thanks to two processes. The first is indeed capillary action. The tubes carrying the water are rather thin, and it clings to the sides of it. But this is a rather small part of the total energy carrying the water. The main mechanism is a negative pressure inside the vascular system of the tree. Basically, tree leaves sweat water all the time (more or less depending on temperature). The water leaving the tree kind of sucks up the water following inside the vessels (this is a simplification to not go into the physics behind). In some larger trees, the negative pressure inside the vascular system can be exceptionally strong, requiring exceptional strength of the tree’s components.

The diapsid part is very likely indeed, as fossil skulls of early stem turtles do show some temporal openings ( https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-110218-024746 ) The point is more where do they nest within Diapsida, more closely to the Lepidosauromorpha, or to the Archosauromorpha, and where precisely if within one of those clades. The point is that can’t quite be proven using only extant species, whether by DNA or morphological evidence. And concerning ML, the methodology is often criticised, not because it’s bad, but because it’s opaque and thus it is difficult to justify and understand as a process

In phylogeny, genomic is just another tool. The point is that turtles are os course animals, but they do branch off of different reptile groups if you look at morphological evidence (which includes fossil data) or at molecular (genetic) evidence (which only includes extant species). This is not something frequent, as usually molecular evidence tends to strengthen previous morphologically established evolutionary relationships. And even though molecularists are more numerous today, their methods are neither better or worse than anatomy.

Phylogeny is not as straightforward as some people make it seem, and especially molecular phylogeny tends to rely on abstract concepts that can’t always be backed up by biological evidence (I’m not saying it’s wrong, it’s very often very good, juste that a lot of people doing it do not understand the way it works, and thus can’t examine the process critically).

And so turtles’ origin are still very much an active debate!

I feel inappropriate near all the very universal questions here, but as a paleontologist specialised in some reptilian groups, the question would probably be “where the fuck do turtles come from?!” The thing is that fossil evidence points to different answers when compared to genetic evidence, and thez separated long enough from other extant groups that we keep on having new “definitive” answers every year

Not sure if it qualifies as nihilistic, but Upgrade (2018) definetely has a very unhappy ending