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rrock

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What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

science.org
957 points·by rrock·tahun lalu·1,536 comments

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rrock
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Surprising that anyone still thinks the Penrose model could work. Microtubules do not exhibit harmonic motion like violin strings. The reason is that all motion at the length scale of cells or smaller is heavily overdamped.

The environment within a cell is nonintuitive. To find out more about this, read “Life at low Reynolds number” or “Mechanics of Motor Proteins and the Cytoskeleton” by Joe Howard.
rrock
·3 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Lossy compression is a bad idea for scientific images. For instance, we often need to understand the statistics of photon detection events in background regions. That’s one of the first things to get tossed.
rrock
·3 tahun yang lalu·discuss
It wasn’t entirely clear in the parts that I watched, but my understanding is that slime molds are actually “social” amoeba. They often crawl around as loners, eating whatever they can find. But if they run out of food, they start sending out chemoattractants to all of their buddies in the neighborhood. They all crawl together and create a fruiting body (a spore) that eventually will break off in the wind and land somewhere else. Hopefully, in greener pastures. Those fruiting bodies are what you see in these videos. Amazing creatures, they live on the brink of multicellular eukaryotes.
rrock
·3 tahun yang lalu·discuss
3% CO2 from mask wearing? I doubt it. I recently needed to measure 5% CO2, and I had to hold my breath to near-passout levels to reach 5% on the monitor. There’s no way that I could tolerate 3% for any length of time.

More likely these authors cherry-picked studies with typos in them.
rrock
·3 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Bit flips from cosmic rays. Earth’s magnetic field helps to shield us, but is disrupted now. I work with a CCD camera in a sub basement lab. On a normal day we see a stray cosmic ray every couple of minutes (as a hot pixel). On a day like today, might be every couple of seconds.
rrock
·4 tahun yang lalu·discuss
He saved all seven shots against, if I recall. And one of them he stood on his head.
rrock
·4 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Generally, the reverse complement of a translated sequence is uninteresting. The function is not encoded in the reverse complement.
rrock
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Exponential growth easily crushes any attempts to surge capacity.
rrock
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Note that MDPI is a predatory journal.

@dang, this is not from nih.gov, you might want to fix that.
rrock
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
You’re right. Some of us only realized our mistake when it was too late.
rrock
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Certainly. For me it started when they removed the entire scientific stack, which broke my install scripts / brewfile. Then, they removed the ability to customize builds, which broke my emacs build. Also hit the OP issues.

In every case they were removing features that were working just fine, and in the process creating work for me. Got fed up, switched to macports (after checking out nix), and so far things are back to the way I like it.
rrock
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
One vote in favor of macports here. I first went from homebrew to nix. Nix was fine, the concept is great but I found the language to be difficult. Ports is closer to homebrew in its simplicity, and has a big catalog (including much of the scientific stack that was removed from homebrew).
rrock
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
The polyA tail is in the 3′ UTR (after the stop codon) and is not translated. It doesn’t appear in the final protein sequence. It’s also a fairly standard feature.
rrock
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
Given the two dozen or so known causes of myocarditis, the vaccine does not stand out here. The risks of complications from the virus do stand out, in stark contrast.
rrock
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
There is no spike protein in the vaccine. There is mRNA. That mRNA needs ribosomes to make the spike protein. So think about where there are ribosomes, and where the protein is made, and you’ll find the correct answer.

I don’t know where you heard the second point, but it is equally incorrect. The mRNA encodes just the spike, with two mutations to lock it into a pre-fusion conformation. Nothing there that qualifies as a “larger stable base”. The sequence is found here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210105162941/https://mednet-co...
rrock
·5 tahun yang lalu·discuss
The vaccine produces spike protein within your deltoid muscle cells, where it is rapidly degraded and presented to your immune system. It’s not running around in your bloodstream. Unlike the virus. Which means, incidentally, that if this is a concern of yours you should definitely prefer getting the vaccine to getting an infection.