Everett examines the culture of the first known human species, Homo erectus, focusing especially on their physical and cultural evolution such as tools, travel, and settlements. He then makes the case that these accomplishments are best explained by the invention of language. Language in turn is shown to be the transfer of information by symbols, where other components of language, such as grammar, play roles in support of symbolic communication. Concrete evidence for symbols among erectus populations is found in their tool construction and “dialectal” tool distinctions.
Month: December 2021
Small Molecule Medicine
Unless you are old or chronically sick, it’s likely that the only drug you’ve ever taken that hasn’t been a small molecule is a vaccine. Indeed, drugs that aren’t small molecules are so strange and rare we usually don’t think of them as “drugs” but as a separate entity: vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, anabolic steroids.
But, like, the vast majority of molecules found in our body, and in all of organic life, are not classified as “small”. And the vast majority of the things doing something interesting are not really molecules, but more so fuzzy complexes of molecules (ribosomes, lysosomes, lipoproteins, membranes).
So why are virtually all drugs small molecules? Prima facie we’d expect most of them to be complexes made up of 10s to 1000s of very large molecules.
The answer lies in several things:
- Easy to mass-produce
- Simple to administer
- Cheap to store
- Homogenous in effect
- Quick to act
Medicine is slowly undergoing the process of learning how to work with complex molecules. In parallel with normal medicine, I’d like to think that biohackers with the ability to custom order whatever they can dream of, will lead the way with self-experimentation. Figuring out the limits and benefits from individualized design and continuous monitoring. For now, this is mainly click-bait, people injecting a bioluminescence gene with CRISPR kinda stuff, but some of it isn’t. As an example, the guy from ThoughtEmporium self-designed a therapy to get rid of lactose intolerance (though the solution is not permanent, it lasts for a few months). 100s of other such people are engaging in similar experiments, and the more people do it, the more resources become available, the easier it will get, and the better the ROI. As this happens, social acceptance will follow and pharmaceutical companies will get more on the deal.
Agrivoltaics
Using vertically mounted bifacial modules allows for more arable land. And if you don’t know what bifacial solar panels are, they can collect solar energy from both sides of the panel. This type of installation would work particularly well in areas that suffer from wind erosion, since the structures reduce wind speeds which can help protect the land and crops grown there. The bifacial panels also can generate more power per square meter than traditional single faced panels and don’t require any moving parts. Then there’s also the option of mounting panels on stilts, which allows farming machinery to pass underneath. In this design you have to maintain a certain clearance between rows to protect the stilts from the machinery, so there is a modest arable land surface loss, usually 3-10%.
2022-09-14: A similar thought process is to combine solar with dams.
Utilizing even small tracts of water can yield outsized benefits. EDP’s Alqueva array, for instance, takes up just 0.016% of the reservoir total surface area. The relative footprint is even smaller when taking into account the reduced need for transmission infrastructure, as the project can plug into the dam’s pre-existing lines.
Moreover, panels and water can have a symbiotic relationship. Modeling the effects of floating panels on water reservoirs found that floating solar panels could reduce evaporation of the water beneath them by 42%. Conversely, solar panels lose generating capacity as they heat up, and the water helps keep panels cool — and 10% more efficient.
2023-06-26: Luminescent Solar Concentrators strike a good balance of energy / agricultural performance.
The idea of Agri-LSC is to allow visible light that crops use for photosynthesis to pass through the panel, while capturing wavelengths of light that are unusable for plants, like infrared and ultraviolet, and converting them into electricity or even transforming them to aid with crop growth. UbiGro is a transparent film that implements a method of LSCs to increase yield for everything from strawberries to cannabis by 20%. They recently teamed up with the solar module company Heliene to add UbiGro film to solar panels, simultaneously generating electricity from low light while aiming to increase plant yield.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 