He coated the rock in “a special epoxy” to prevent it from crumbling during slicing. Then, he washed the thin sections in a special dye that stained the DNA of the microbial cells.
What does that mean—I thought DNA was smaller that the wavelength of visible light? I guess it’s some larger molecule that binds to the DNA to make it more visible, but if that’s the case, “tagging” seems like a more appropriate term than “staining”.
A typical use case is to forward a single port to the proxy, then set the proxy to map different subdomains to different machines/ports on your internal network. Anything not explicitly mapped by the reverse proxy isn’t visible externally.
You’re describing the Spanish-American War, when the US seized Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain.
I mean, every process requires an energy output similar to a very small nuclear explosion, for some definition of “very small”.
Is this science reporting, or did the Mirror’s political editor just run out of material?
Yes, but they generally had twice as many back then.
Dinosaur teleportation technology proved!
Among other factors, I think humans have a certain instinctive drive: when there’s a broad sense of social malaise—when lots of people feel there’s something wrong with their social institutions, but there’s no consensus on how to remedy it—they gravitate toward whatever thing the social establishment seems most afraid of, because in our deep history that’s been an effective way to break out of dangerous institutional stasis.
Depending on the social establishment at the time, that anti-establishment movement could take many forms—religious, ideological, nationalistic, etc. So I think Trumpism is an inevitable reaction to the rise of the neoliberal establishment under Clinton and the Bushes: the underlying cause of the neoliberal malaise is economic, but the most visible social anxieties are over racism, sexism, and other social factors. So that creates a feedback loop of growing fear that attracts those feeling a general sense of discontent.
I liked it as a story, but it bothers me that so many people see it as hard sci-fi—it’s basically fantasy written with hard sci-fi literary tropes.
See the Julian day.
So is Nature itself taking any steps to address the issue?
So some of the inner flesh toward the middle transforms into outer skin?
The definition I’ve seen is the last common ancestor of procaryotes, eucaryotes, and archaea—which doesn’t strictly rule out the possibility of extinct domains whose existence we might infer.
And actually, there’s evidence of non-LUCA-descended organisms mentioned right in the paper: the other organisms that constituted the ecosystem of which LUCA was a part, whose existence (and some of whose characteristics) could be inferred from LUCA’s metabolism and immune system.
Using genetics alone, sure. But maybe there’s fossil or geochemical evidence of early organisms not belonging to any of the three surviving domains—or maybe we could estimate it just from statistics.
Any way of estimating when the last lineages of organisms not descended from the LUCA died out?
There have been studies suggesting prefrontal synthesis (the ability to consciously construct novel mental images) doesn’t develop in humans unless they learn a language before the age of five or so.
It doesn’t make sense that we couldn’t see it and the particles that could explain it seemed like they were invented just to justify dark matter
It always seemed like a natural assumption to me: the particles we know about were discovered because they interact with each other via at least one other force in addition to gravity. But there’s no other force common to all particles, so why not expect particles that only interact via gravity? They’d naturally be hard to detect, since gravity is so much weaker than the other forces.
Assuming that the only particles that exist are the ones that happen to be easy for us to detect feels like observer bias.
Every screw colony has a queen screw.
It’s usually used for something that changes the superficial appearance of a thing without changing or obsuring its structure—and in this context it seems to mean making the DNA more detectable (by whatever means). I’m not picturing how this “dye” could do both those things at once on that scale.