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true but there's a ton of people I know who are looking for help at the... zero.five stage, and there isn't a good way for them to get in touch with people who are maybe between zero.six-one, does that make sense?

Commenting to add that this seems like the realm of small business development centers and regional innovation hubs but SBDCs are usually populated by olds, and innovation hubs are government run programs that stink of mothballs

I think sometimes ideas that are couched in scientific sounding language get picked up culturally for a while before the rest of the process catches up

Folks elsewhere have mentioned things like EPA regulation of chemicals - hard to argue that even though it could be better that there haven't been many great things that have happened directly as a result of that act. See the Cuyahoga river: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught...

Probably not, since the track record for this kind of labeling is mostly greenwashing and virtue signalling that allows malfeasance to continue uninterrupted

good maybe they'll hear me bitching about playing the same two van morrison songs on repeat for the last five years and do something about it

"what about taking a functioning company and bringing it to its knees?" he says. Sounds like a velvet revolution...

looks like the vicar of rockfish parish

Cool article! Wish more people thought this way.

This is really cool looking, how did you make the animation?

Really love this. How did you decide on the rotational transmission, rather than electron "flow"?

Basically a discussion of how we've come to misunderstand infection as a bullet-target mechanism, rather than something more nuanced.

I am confused by this - how do I know what I'm buying if there's not a single article available? Or is it one of those things where if you have to ask what it is, it's not for you?

90% saturation in a few generations suggests that it is something other than purely hereditary mutations accumulating: https://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120

sure is.. but somehow biology manages it with few issues. It seems like it has a lot to do with the presence of chaperone proteins that babysit the protein as it's coming off the ribosome, preventing pieces of it from sticking together that shouldn't touch, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein#/media/File:Chaperonin...

I'm working on making a model of this chaperone complex relative to a folded protein to get a sense of how it might be interacting with the amino acid chain before it becomes globular

Protein folding is amazing! Seems like it happens in realtime as it's synthesized by the ribosome.. I'll dig around and see if I can find a better resource for you.

No, more things that are modifications without any genetic basis - like myopia. Doesn't seem to have any genetic/epigenetic basis. It's purely a physical use case, where the eye matures improperly if it's only exposed to near-field work.

Like.... why are sub-atomic phenomena important in general?

Another frustrating one - what is heredity? If it's possible to inherit something due to a shift in behavior (i.e. it's a cultural change that leads to a biochemical change), how does that connect neatly to mendalian inheritance?

Fascinating, I never knew! Though if they're producing organic matter in their castings, this should also be a food source for all the other creatures hanging around..

about 3/4 of the way down the page, just before the heading "Viruses all the way down"

"Except you know what’s weird? Although the absolute diversity of prokaryotes is widely held to be unknown and unknowable at any scale, most new genetic information we find in bacteria is similar to genetic information we’ve seen elsewhere. It’s a comforting reminder that, although large-grain diversity is uncountably large, most genes in diverse bacteria have sequence-based similarity. But when you sequence a sample of mixed viruses, most of that genetic information has never been seen before, anywhere. "

interesting, do you live alone?

I'm really hoping to see that - certainly some teams will underperform but I have a gut feeling that there's a lot of people who would do a lot better without having to do any water cooler chitchat

that sounds like the company needs to restructure it's hiring/firing framework rather than punishing those who would be great at wfh.

well that and violence

I kinda figure the only purpose of the law is to protect citizens against the vagaries of unchecked economic progress

ooooo externality mandated wfh I love it

this is a fascinating line of inquiry, and comes down to the methods of detection being insufficiently fine-grain.

it's challenging to tell apart all of the pieces in a metagenomic sample except through assembly. A "viral plasmid" like you describe would go unnoticed simply because it would map to another sequence assembly.

there's indication of high copy-number plasmids in bacteria sometimes. not sure if anyone has looked to see if any of those are kept in the outside of the cell.

usually imaged cells are washed very well before imaging, otherwise background is off the charts...

So the crazy thing is that if you take a teaspoon of soil and sequence it for bacterial information, almost all of that information is similar to what's been found elsewhere. If you take that same teaspoon of soil and look for the viral genetic information in there, it's wholly unique. They seem completely unconnected to the rest of life, as far as nucleic acid signatures go.

I think it's a complexity problem. Someone downthread pointed out that there are some viruses that are small - so small they consist of only two genes.

It's possible that the super simple minimalist viruses are spontaneously produced and abundant in the universe. If all that's necessary is a strand of nucelic acids and a repetitive peptide unit, then it's within the realm of possibility that these would form simply because it's thermodynamically favorable for them to fall together in some systems. Then, if they encounter a living being, they're able to piggyback on it to multiply, mutate, and recombine.

This could be further supported by the fact that viruses can coinfect cells and effectively transfer genetic and protein material between each other.

By this model the simplest viruses are just products of chemistry that, when exposed to life, gradually become more and more complex.

I guess the underlying point is that they could very well be forming on earth, continuously. If they are, then that would explain the baffling, unending diversity. They're just always forming new genetic material that gets iterated on until it works well.