“Trump deports Pope” is on my bingo card.

You can modify native plants in the same way, and yeah of-course they’re gonna have less fitness.

I think people often forget that a lot of the cool / important stuff happens on the molecular level. You can add GFP or whatever to any native species. I’ve been advocating modifying native plants with carboxysomes as way to address climate change for some time – admittedly it’s a not as simple I make it out to be, but it’s definitely in the realm of possibilities.

Dude, this is wicked cool! This is the kinda shit we ought to be doing with biology. As an aspiring bioengineer myself, I fully approve of this, and think Americans should take it as a challenge to make brighter plants. Are we going to let the Chinese out shine us? Probably because our country is full of lawyers who are scared of literally any change.

Y’all seen those people who go out and plant their own plants around the neighborhood without approval? We should have them team up with that chick who crashed the rare plant market by explaining tissue culture and light up our neighborhoods with glowing plants! It would be badass, and we’d build community having people out every night seeing the cool plants.

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Right! Plus, it’d be an ideal route to solicit donations to the university - people are more attached to their social media than sports ball teams. Not hosting lemmy and mastadon instances is practically throwing away money!

While I don’t disagree with the transparency Mozilla is advocates, I think it fails to address the underlying problem then tries to compensate by picking and choosing winners (which arguably is the same as the underlying problem). The underlying problem is the ad-incentivized watchtime algorithm, which isn’t a technical issue but a financing one.

I’ve been an advocate of endowments for a long time, but this is just another area where they’d be ideal. They supply a small steady income to support a relatively cheap product. As the website grows you can either do temporary ads to grow the endowment or ask for donations. Either way, it’s not that hard to fund operations this small. Add in federated systems like lemmy and each individual operation is even smaller and cheaper.

Heck, universities who are already accustom to dealing with endowments would be ideal places to host lemmy instances. I can definitely imagine offering to donate 10k to an endowment dedicated to hosting a lemmy and mastadon instance with open to registration to students, staff, and alumni. Maybe coordinate with the computer science and IT folks. Allow some percentage of the endowment income to go to “salary overhead” while the rest just funds the server. Point out that the university would essentially be creating the perfect route to solicit donations and they might do it themselves… Honestly, I’m probably gonna flesh this idea out and email the people at my university because it’s just too perfect of a solution.

There was a similar post recently about Cambridge leaving twitter, and it got me thinking that universities are really the ideal organizations to host lemmy servers. They have a vested interest in truth and community building. They have a decent enough sense of free speech to stay federated with most other instances. They have pre-existing communities on topic ranging from clubs to technical subjects. Users can confirm their identities by association with the universities, which will keep things civil. Obviously I don’t think they should be the only instances - anonymity has it’s place and value - but I really think universities should be hosting instances.

Yeah, Clockwork’s channel is great. Given those interests you might like his other video on the color of fall leaves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOjkeyjJ364

Good for them.

I’m a scientist, but I’m not about that whole confrontational competitive nation-states super-power nonsense. If the US doesn’t care about science, that sucks for me, but I’m happy to see the work get done and the world made a better place.

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I can’t wait to make a scene at the grocery store demanding they give me change in real money.

So, how long until antimatter missiles?

Yeah, I’m not really a space guy, but let me spitball a few potentially relevant mechanisms.

I know less about the space part, but my understanding was that planets tended to sweep up asteroids near their orbit, but I don’t have a great grasp on how much space that is compared to the likely space an asteroid would end up in after some large collision. There’s also the collisions between asteroids that might scatter about the first life-containing asteroid. To me the largest issue with panspermia has always been the distance between stars and the chances of hitting somewhere that can sustain life once flung out of a solar system. Since that’s presumably much less of an issue for in an solar system event between direct neighbors, it seems a much more viable mechanism.

As for the biology part, I’d point out we’re not talking about fragile complex life. We’re talking microbes. I don’t think it’s too crazy for microbial life to survive in a dormient state for a moderate time. The cold isn’t really an issue since we freeze bacteria all the time in lab with relatively little issue. The dangers are heat and radiation. For heat, I’d point out that if you autoclave soil, apparently a lot of bacteria can hide inside and survive, so you could think of the nooks and crannies of the asteroid as refugia for microbial life. I suspect radiation is the larger issue, and I don’t really know what it takes to shield them or the extent to which it’s possible or necessary – dose and travel time calculations seem most concerning to me.

Anyway, take all that with a grain of salt though because I don’t know what types of asteroids these nucleic acids were found on or how well they do at each of these challenges. I don’t know if these mechanisms are forming a narrative consistent with the data. It could be that I’m missing something about nucleic acids that make them way more common than I’m expecting and that or even some other mechanism is more consistent with the data. I just know what we ought test from a molecular biology stand point (chirality, base similarity, etc).

I admit that the ionic liquids are an interesting concept for strange life. That said, most the ones they have look far too complex to have formed by any natural process in any meaningful amount, and anything that could form naturally doesn’t seem likely to have good a temperature range for compatible polymers. Maybe there’s something weird I’m missing (something that increases the NH3 liquid range and doesn’t react with siloconates or something crazy like that), but I’d be extremely skeptical of life without water.

I’m more in protein design than origin of life, so it may be that people in that field have more informed opinions. That said, I think most people agree that life on earth, regardless of where it started out, started with self-assembling self-replicating RNAs, so the logic is pretty simply that if we’re finding nucleic acids out in space it’s likely the same life. Unlike amino-acids which are the smallest polymer with a solvent byproduct, there’s nothing about nucleic acids that makes that molecule (those base pairs or closely related bases) special or optimal. I’m more protein than RNA, so maybe someone else has a different opinion, but to me it seems like it’d be almost trivial to come up with alternative bases or even modified backbones that meet the broad requirements of folding (for functions) and dimerizing (for genes).

Additionally, (and I know a lot less about this) apparently Mars had a lot of water for quite some time but loss most of it due to the lack of a magnetic field. So add in some asteroids flinging stuff off the planet and the timeline may add up.

Panspermia may not be the right term. I think panspermia is generally discussed among the public as life coming from outside the solar system, and I think most scientists would be extremely skeptical of that notion. Space is a really harsh environment and the odds of randomly getting between solar systems in bad before you start talking about survival parameters. I suspect you’d find more people who think an in-solar-system panspermia event occurred than life evolving twice in one solar system and both converged on the same base genetic molecules, and it’s increasingly obvious that the life on mars hypothesis is at least worth testing, so that’s the narrative. Perhaps I should’ve said Mars-spermia.

I’'m a molecular biologist, so this is tangentially related to my field. I think there’s even odds life originated on mars then hopped to earth. NASA has been laying the ground work for a sample return mission for a while now to prove this one way or the other, but apparently the evidence has been mounting for decades.

It’ll be pretty easy to tell once they get some uncontaminated mars rocks. While a lot of life works the way it does because it has to or because it’s optimal for evolution, there’s no accounting for chirality in amino acids (though amino acids in general are arguably inevitable) and nucleic acids are also probably unique to our form of life – at least I haven’t heard or thought of a reason nucleic acids specifically (not some other folding semi-dimer molecule) would be inevitable. There’s also certain amino acid side chains that seem unlikely to be shared; though, unshared side chains would mean little.

It’d actually be a bit sad if life originated on mars as people would suddenly be a lot more interested in searching the stars for life, but the chances of finding it would dramatically drop as a single panspermia event would strongly suggest that complex life requires much more time to evolve than most planets have as a habitable lifespan. I suppose an optimist could argue that humanity is early and/or lucky.

I recently learned about it from Benn Jordan – I think his anarchism video referenced both Metastatic and Reticulum. They’ve kinda been stuck in my head since I have a unihertz atom phone that’s supposed to have built in radio (400-480mhz). Was thinking I might see if I can set something up on that. I’m sure someone has already set something up on android, but I haven’t made the time yet.

Countries shouldn’t respect medical intellectual properties in the first place. What the WTO has done to African nations in coercing them into these “agreements” is morally reprehensible. In fact, I’m increasingly in agreement with that British economist who’s been pushing African Countries to enact currency controls, which she argues will allow them to be more independent of the US global currency system.

Honestly, what’s even the point of having a country without a currency you control independent of the whims of whatever fascist my fellow Americans elect.

Related geis-archive Image.

I really like the YFP lantern.