Tag: science

What the Celts drank

Our analyses confirm that they indeed consumed imported wines, but they also drank local beer from the Greek drinking bowls. In other words, the Celts did not simply adopt foreign traditions in their original form. Instead, they used the imported vessels and products in their own ways and for their own purposes. Moreover, the consumption of imported wine was apparently not confined to the upper echelons of society. Craftsmen too had access to wine, and the evidence suggests that they possibly used it for cooking, while the elites quaffed it in the course of their drinking parties

Fast Revolutions

Everything about this system is extreme. But it’s the stars themselves that get to me. Think of it this way: The Earth’s gravity is strong enough to keep the Moon going around it with an orbital period of a little over 27 days. At the same distance, J17062’s gravity whips its companion around over 1000x faster.

Quantum amplification

Their method achieves 50 times more precision than the previous best techniques, which also means that they can make measurements 50 times faster than before. Now they can narrow down the particle’s location to an atom-sized space in less than a second. The key to their method is to accept the noisiness decreed by the uncertainty principle, and control where it manifests itself. To measure the ion’s position, they basically transfer the uncertainty into its speed, a value they happen to care less about.

Positive creativity

people are more likely to maintain broader attention and solve problems when they’re in a positive mood. “The basic idea is that a positive mood loosens the grip of attention, so that stimuli and ideas that used to get filtered out can now have a greater impact on mental processing. Stress and anxiety have the opposite effect, narrowing attention, which can be good for focused analytic thinking—as long as you keep focus on the right information—but bad for broader creative thinking.”

Speed Breeding

Combining speed breeding with gene editing and other technologies is the best way to improve crops. We already have test fields with 3x yield. Getting another 2x would feed more than 20B people. They trick the crops into flowering early by using blue and red LED lights for 22 hours a day and keeping temperatures between 16 and 22 degrees Celsius. They can grow up to 6 generations of wheat, barley, chickpeas and canola in a year instead of only 1-2 crops each year using old farming methods.

Dog eye evolution

dogs’ faces are structured for complex expression in a way that wolves’ aren’t, thanks to a special pair of muscles framing their eyes. These muscles are responsible for that “adopt me” look that dogs can pull by raising their inner eyebrows. It’s the first biological evidence scientists have found that domesticated dogs might have evolved a specialized ability used expressly to communicate better with humans

Radio Occultation Weather

the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate (or COSMIC-2), the mission takes advantage of a weird property of GPS radio signals: They actually bend and slow down slightly as they travel through the atmosphere. This bending doesn’t affect the accuracy of navigation on the ground; it’s only visible from the side by something else in orbit. radio occultation, as it’s known, is akin to launching 5000 additional weather balloons every day—that’s how many more measurements the 6 COSMIC-2 satellites will be able to gather.

Cell Compartmentalization

When compartmentalization was thought of as a singular feature of eukaryotes, experts were often forced to speculate about how it came about, what the biophysical constraints were, and what selective advantages it might have. “That’s where these prokaryotes become really interesting. If they show some features that are even mildly similar to what we see in eukaryotes, it allows us to broaden the question and attack from a different angle: Under what conditions might compartmentation provide some benefit? Or is it just the case that there’s no benefit whatsoever?” The bacterial cases “suggest that there are multiple ways to do this, and that there could be a strong evolutionary advantage to doing so.” That certainly seems to have been the case with energy production: The independent evolution of anammoxosomes in some kinds of bacteria and mitochondria in eukaryotes signify that “the compartmentalization of energy metabolism is beneficial to the cell. You see a trend in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes to compartmentalize certain traits or certain functions in order to better control them.”

2021-01-10: Biomolecular condensates are an emerging type of membrane-less organelle, and adding a lot to our understanding of cell compartmentalization.

Inside cells, droplets of biomolecules called condensates merge, divide and dissolve. Their dance may regulate vital processes. Biomolecular Condensates may explain the speed of many cellular processes. “The key thing about a condensate — it’s not like a factory; it’s more like a flash mob. You turn on the radio, and everyone comes together, and then you turn it off and everyone disappears”


2022-11-02: Condensates are getting more refined experiments to figure out what’s going on

After an initial rush to document the phenomenon in every nook and cranny of the cell, scientists are beginning to ask more detailed questions. They want to know what these globules are doing, how they form and, importantly, how to prove that these biomolecular condensates are really as widespread and essential to the cell as many reports have claimed. Researchers are also responding to critics who have questioned the accuracy of some descriptions of phase separation in cells, arguing that other forces besides phase separation could have created droplets.
Inside the condensates, enzymatic reactions were 36x faster. Condensates gave the process extra structure: they helped to organize the enzymes spatially, providing a molecular ‘scaffold’ so that they could more easily partner with their reactants. “You get this combined effect of increasing efficiency and increasing concentration”
Some in the community have sought to inject precision into the field and guide researchers in finding out whether a blob forms through phase separation or in some other way. Despite the debates in academia, drug hunters are embracing the concept. Most companies interested in phase separation are prioritizing drug development for cancer and neurological disorders, 2 disease classes frequently linked to condensates that have gone awry.