Plants build three-carbon sugars during photosynthesis by fixing a CO2 molecule onto a two-carbon chain with an enzyme called RuBisCO. In a typical "C3" plant, this happens relatively directly. But RuBisCO can screw up and fix an O2 molecule instead, and the erroneous result costs the plant energy to repair.
As the temperature rises, so does the error rate. At a high-enough temperature, the plant loses energy overall, which it can't survive long term.
C4 plants separate this process into two steps spatially. They build a four-carbon molecule in a much less error-prone way, then move this to a part of the cell where it's broken down into CO2. RuBisCO is again used to build the three-carbon sugars, but because the relative concentration of CO2 to O2 is so high, the error rate is low. There's some additional overhead to this process, but it pays off in warm climates.
Incidentally, there's another warm-climate metabolism: CAM (crassulacean acid metabolism). CAM works by temporally separating parts of the process. At night, they open their stomata, and use CO2 to build an acid. During the day, they close their stomata, cleave CO2 off of the acid to increase the concentration, and let RuBisCO its thing.
I believe RuBisCO is the most common enzyme on Earth by weight. I find it striking that Mother Nature has had to find all these hacks to get around its shortcomings, but hasn't found a way to simply fix the enzyme so it doesn't make so many errors.
I’d agree - but is it? Where I live (not a top-ten US metro area) we also have Lyft and a number of traditional cab companies. Uber is big, but by no means a monopoly.
I’m not a huge fan of Uber’s corporate policies in general, but help me understand what’s wrong with this. Isn’t this what any company would do: maximize revenue from customers while minimizing expenses to their suppliers? Most businesses don’t tells us how they do this.
My grocer sells me a can of beans at some price. I have no idea how they arrived at that price, how much they paid their wholesaler, or that they may have a sale on beans next week. I buy or don’t buy beans based on whether I feel they’re worth the cost. And whether I feel like beans.
One data point: I’ve taught a few times at a community college here in the US. Obviously, that’s through an established institution. It paid about $7k for a ten-week course.
It's worth mentioning that while some parts of law can be really arcane (parents, terms of service, etc.), Supreme Court decisions are generally pretty readable.
From what the Hudson Rock article shows, they were able to use an SE’s creds to access their demo account. This is not a customer account and shouldn’t (but of course could) contain sensitive info. It’s not clear to me how this snowballed into a larger breach.
Perhaps customers had granted this SE access to their accounts and the data within. Or perhaps there’s a deeper hack. But this isn’t clear to me from what I’ve read.
I don't know how to test this in an experimental way because I don't know how to make it repeatable.
I can say anecdotally that I've used non-software patents to figure out how to level a door via its hinges, find out how Pop Rocks are made, and understand how they keep air sickness bags from leaking. Nothing earth shattering, but interesting. It is worth noting that I could easily follow all of these even though I'm a complete non-expert on any of the subjects.
I've never gotten anything out of a software patent. I have a hard time even reading mine. This leads me to the hypothesis (which seems testable) that software patents are particularly broken.
One goal is to encourage inventors to publish their work, rather than hold them as trade secrets, so that others can learn from them -- and get eventually copy and extend them.
I've read a fair number of patents, both in and outside of software, and my biggest problem with software patents is that most of them are absolute crap: they are generally neither innovative nor insightful.
“Hereafter, we let n and m refer to the number of non-compactified space and time dimensions, or more generally to the effective spacetime dimensionality that is relevant to the low-energy physics we will be discussing later.”