tingilinde

physics girl takes a cool dive

on metabolism

A New Yorker essay by James Somers

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Lane writes that the “proton motive force” of those little turbines is one of the few mechanisms present in all life forms. In you and me and everything that lives, high-energy electrons are stripped slowly of their verve. Metabolism achieves something miraculous: through painstaking atomic transformations, it extracts from practically any organic chemical a universal unit of energy, deployable in every corner of every cell, and it does this while wasting nothing. Life’s use of a standardized part like ATP is almost Taylorist; the efficiencies are unfathomable. A body ingests charged particles and sends them through tiny windmills; a brain crackling with a hundred trillion electric connections can be powered for a whole day by a sandwich.

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It's also interesting to note that measuring how it works is still extremely difficult - so much thatpronostications made by  smartwatches and the like are directional at best.

 

science in the mountains

An important observatory near Mt Everest is in need of serious repair.

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For instance, scientists say that 30 years of data is the minimum requirement to assess the impacts of climate change over any area. “In 2024 we will have 30 years of data on weather stations. The next few years are very crucial for us,” says Gian Pietro Verza, an unpaid senior member of the Pyramid’s technical staff, who still trains Bista for the facility’s general maintenance. Verza says the Pyramid is the longest running weather station in the Himalayas, and its data are crucial for the assessment of climate change in this part of the world.

It seems, the committee running the lab is pushing to keep it alive at least until that date. But a question has to be addressed: What happens after that? “We have to find a long-term solution now,” Verza says.

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horizontal gene transfer

When genes move between species.

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When Atsushi Kurabayashi, an associate professor at the Nagahama Institute of Bio-Science and Technology and the senior author of the new paper, first saw the snake version of the gene in frogs, he was puzzled. He asked a colleague who specializes in genomics about it, and the colleague immediately shouted, “It must be horizontal transfer!” — the transfer of a gene from one species to another, in contrast to the vertical inheritance of genes by a child from a parent.

That outburst sent Kurabayashi on the trail of a phenomenon once thought to be exceedingly rare, though the rise of better genomic sequencing has biologists reevaluating that opinion. And this new paper, which shows that the horizontal transfer of genes may be more likely in some places than others, complicates the story even more. It suggests that when seeking explanations for horizontal transfers, researchers may need to look beyond simple genetic mechanisms to the ecological contexts in which species live. Genomicists are still struggling to understand how common or rare horizontal transfers are in complex organisms, but some places, like Madagascar, may be hot spots for them.

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menstral regulation

A potential technique for women, but christo-fascist legislatures and courts would make it illegal in the US because they beive women need to be controlled.

 

extreme life on mars?

It's possible some microbes could survive for hundreds of millions of years..

many many ifs...

 

 

 

sketchy peformancev- those 503s and worse

The hosting company that I pay money to is having serious difficulties following a facility move.  If things seem broken, they are.  At the moment it's impossible to post images.

It probably makes sense to move, but that would be a big undertaking, so hopefully they'll get their act together.

 

 

not an insult to the scots

Scot-free has nothing to do with the Scots language or Scot people.

 

the musical score of the rings of power

An interview with composer Bear McCreary.

a tip of the hat to John

 

 

science education for non-scientists

What it is and how it's doneis rarely communicated.

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The Sputnik-era reforms produced a cadre of experts. But these reforms were largely unsuccessful in helping the public understand how science works, why science matters, and why and when it should be trusted. Reading most textbooks today, a student might never realize that before settled facts and models emerge, there is a period of uncertainty and disagreement. As we have seen during the COVID pandemic, some people think that the absence of consensus is an indication of some sort of scandal or malfeasance, instead of the way science is conducted. From there, one might be inclined to doubt the entire system, including any subsequent consensus.

It’s easy to see why so many of us struggle to distinguish trustworthy science from what is flawed, speculative or fundamentally wrong. When we don’t learn the nature of consensus, how science tends to be self-correcting and how community as well as individual incentives bring to light discrepancies in theory and data, we are vulnerable to false beliefs and antiscience propaganda. Indeed, misinformation is now a pervasive threat to national and international security and well-being.

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