There's a type of bacteria that infects caterpillars and produces a toxin that makes them lose all rigidity. The toxin is called MCF.

MCF stand for Makes Caterpillars Floppy

Edit: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15009026/

scientists work their asses off, its nice to have a little fun and make the endless hours all worth it.

Not exactly the same but I remember starting my software engineering course and having to remote into the university servers to write code. All the servers were named after Red Dwarf characters. Being a career changer, as soon as I saw the server names I had this calming feeling that I'd finally found my people and everything was going to be ok.

Physics is a mixed bag with this stuff. Gell-Mann came up with the name quarks after a line from Finnegan's Wake because Joyce referenced them as coming in three. It was a nonsense word inserted just to rhyme with Mark, Park, etc, so its pronunciation in physics isn't even correct, but it was fun and physicists were just having a good time with it.

Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he has not got much of a bark And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

Then we got the strange/charm and top/bottom (which was originally the beauty/truth, so bullet dodged there) so the quarks really got all the fun names. Strong Force physics in general gets the good stuff: Axions were named after a detergent because they helped "clean up" the strong CP-violation problem of the standard model. Fantastic, no notes.

Neutrinos (my field of study), had so much potential for fun, stupid naming that was squandered. The neutrino was originally proposed with the name "neutron" by Pauli, but then the actual neutron was discovered and observed first, so the name got pinched. To remedy this, the electron neutrino was dubbed "neutrino" or little neutron (they didn't know that other flavors of neutrino existed). Meanwhile, the muon neutrino was originally supposed to be the neutretto (before they realized that the neutral leptons were related by the different particle generations), so we could have had a world where each generation of neutral lepton was just another combination of neutron + diminutive italian suffix.

1. Neutrino
2. Neutretto/neutronetto
3. Neutrello/neutronello

Then, when the mass eigenstates were confirmed, we could have diversified and gone with big suffixes to indicate that neutrinos have mass.

1. Neutroni
2. Neutrachione/neutronachione
3. Neutrozzo/neutronozzo

But noooooo, particle physics decided to just give neutrinos the lamest possible names, electron/muon/tau neutrinos for flavor states and m_1/m_2/m_3 neutrino for mass states. I am ashamed of my predecessors for what they've done.

Don't even get me started on the J/Psi debacle...

To be honest, love the “Ferrous Wheel” pun. It’s too good.

#transcription

fuckingflying

I hate linguistic anthropology. Why? One of the most influential experiments in linguistic anthropology involved teaching a chimp asl. One of the most influential linguistics is named Noam Chomsky. You know what the chimp's name was?

Nim Chimpsky.

Fucking monkey pun.

And this is in textbooks, in documentaries, everywhere. And everyone just IGNORES THIS GOD AWFUL PUN cause of how important the experiment was. But

BUT LOOK AT THIS SHIT. FUCKING NIM CHIMPSKY. I HATE THIS WHOLE FIELD.

dendritic-trees
Its not just the linguistic anthropologists.

There's a group of very important genes that determine if your body develops in the right shape/organization... they are called the hedgehog genes, because fruit fly geneticists are all ridiculous. The different hedgehog genes are all named after different hedgehogs. And then someone decided to get clever and name one "sonic hedgehog' because this is just what fruitfly geneticists do.

Well sonic hedgehog controls brain development, and now actual doctors are stuck in the position of explaining to grieving parents that their child's lethal birth defects or life-threatening tumors are caused by a "sonic hedgehog mutation".

And this is why no one will invite the fruit fly people to parties.

error-404-fuck-not-found
Biogeochemical scientists, upon discovering the complex mechanisms that govern the storage and use of molecular iron on our planet, decided to call this cycle "the ferrous wheel". We groaned about that for at least five solid minutes.

callmegallifreya
The phenomenon of sneezing when exposed to sudden bright light is called an Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio Opthalmic Outburst. ACHOO Half a byte of data is a nibble.

I'll just leave this here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox%E2%80%93Zucker_machine

The predicted outcomes of sinus surgery for chronic rhinosinusitis may use the SNOT scale (sinonasal outcome test)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer

These are hilarious. I NEED MORE!

Half a byte being a nibble is too cute to hate.

Fun fact (not really) about Nim: he and the other ASL chimps were HORRIBLY abused. Basically every single one of them.

And it was all for nothing, not a single bit of evidence shows that teaching chimps ASL worked and allowed any form of actual communication.

Yes, even Koko.

https://youtu.be/e7wFotDKEF4

Meanwhile, in immunology:

"Can we have fun names?"

"NO! Now shut up and keep isolating proteins and cell markers!"

1/4 of a byte, or half of a nibble, is a crumb.

Hahaha, I've assumed it was just computer-science dorks, but maybe the urge to pick stupid names is intrinsic to all science dorks.

I dunno if any of the "soft sciences" will get this, but naming things is in NP-hard.

After looking this up, TIL that Knuckles is an echidna. I had no idea!

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/N/nybble.html

Worth noting that at the time of documentation a half-byte was a nybble, and the more mundane spelling came along later

edit: ooooo I just remembered the Cox-Zucker algorithm too! Evidently the two guys behind the algo only decided to work together because of their last names.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox%E2%80%93Zucker_machine

Meanwhile psychologists just name things as exactly blandly as they can. There's a neat phenomenon where a relationship can immediately be viewed as deeper and more connected, merely by one of the individuals sharing deeply personal information. It even works at the very first interaction. In other words, if someone tends to overshare, or blurt out info about themselves, we measure their blirtasiousness and its effect on relationships. Not even kidding. I think the folks who came up with it were Scottish, which is why the blirt rather than blurt.

17, 18, and 19 on the periodic table spell out ClArK, guess what's below 18. Krypton. I can't remember which one came first, but superman is baked into the periodic table and I can't help but remember that everytime I think about chemistry.

It’s a nybble…

I've learnt about byte/nibble over 30 years ago and just now got the pun.

In quantum mechanics, there are types of vectors that are written like |a>, which is called a "ket", and their dual vectors as <a|, which are called "bra". You write the scalar product as <a|b>. This is called the Bra-Ket-Notation.

There's always NMR scientists. Proton-Enhanced Nuclear Induction Spectroscopy.

Also one paper that was talking about copper nanotubes (NT). So it was shortened to CuNT. I think that paper may have been oblivious to it though?

C++ is just the next iteration of C. C# is just another layer of iteration on top of C++. Flags are simple indicators for programs, usually set by a controlling human/system, semaphores are flags that communicate between processes.

I looked it up and yep it's all true.

Not just hedgehog, there's one called Sonic Hedgehog...

And there's an enzyme called Fuculokinase sometimes abbreviated "Fuck" in the literature because some of us are still 12 years old.

Here and Here are examples

I got bits and bytes mixed up for a minute, and was trying to figure out how the heck you halve a boolean

Been in a lab meeting (biochemists) with a group who were naming a new method they made. They started with the acronym and decided what it would stand for second.