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Even though it may be technically wrong specific heat is often used to mean molar heat capacity even in many publications.

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At present there's at least a species of ladybug that often has an odd number of chromosomes - some members of that species has a couple of chromosomes fused. This doesn't significantly impact fertility: if a ladybug only has one fused chromosome then during meiosis the unfused counterparts just line up end to end next to it.

The ancestors of humans also had a similar deal but afaik there are no modern humans with unfused chromosome 2.

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This. The apocrine glands are more dense in those areas and have more reactive androgen and estrogen receptors. They also may be more dense in steroidogenesis enzymes which change cholesterol/other steroids into other compounds.

A common effect of anabolic steroids is a massive change to your armpit smell.

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Yeah! A lot of grasses and other grass like plants are triploid as well.

This is called an XO sex determination system and has been independently evolved in mammals, so it can happen.

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The rule of animal husbandry is "never put anything beyond horney creatures" or "anything that can go wrong will go wrong, including your best mule can't plow because she's got one 1⃣ the way with no daddy within 20 miles."

There isn't really one authoritative "current definition" of a species the way we're taught in lower-level science courses, at least not one so clear-cut and universal. If you ask a molecular biologist, a botanist, a zoologist, an ecologist, a geneticist, and a paleontologist to define a species you'll get six different, and sometimes contradictory, answers. Hell, if you ask two biologists in the same field you'll occasionally get competing answers.

These different definitions are called species concepts, of which probably the most common is the biological species concept. This is the one that you're referring to, which defines species based upon reproductive isolation. But it's not a perfect nor universal definition; it's entirely useless for asexual organisms, isn't informative in cases of horizontal gene tranfer, can't be directly tested in certain circumstances like when dealing with fossil species, and even breaks down with extant sexual populations in situations like ring species or many cases of hybridization (which we're learning is a lot more common and complex than previously thought). Other species concepts work better when dealing with asexual populations, or extinct groups, or when working specifically at the genomic level.

Most biologists work within the framework of whatever species concept best fits their field day-to-day as a shorthand but recognize there's a lot of nuance to the biological reality. That is to say, it's not as simple as can interbreed or can't.

> And yeah its a horrible word. Doesn't make any sense with the normal English definition of specific. Old science terms are often bad science terms in modern English.

I'd guess it's a bit too literal translation from the German spezifisch which means "specific", "particular", but also "intrinsic", which is much closer to the actual meaning. (For a long time, German was the lingua franca of physics.)

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It now makes sense why I've heard of triploidy in Aspen in particular, as they are clonal species :)

Well, it looks like you are right - I apologize, I was not aware that triploids are generally sterile. Apparently they can reproduce but it's not as common: https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/51/8/article-p968.xml#:~:text=Triploids%20are%20typically%20highly%20infertile,et%20al.%2C%202011).

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