Aminoxyl

I understood the entropy comment, as far as I am aware (and this is from basic pre-university chemistry that I was taught) entropy is the order state of a system. A system with a high amount of entropy for would be a disordely system with particles vibrating a lot. For example an ice-cube could be a system of low entropy and the water it melts into of higher entropy. Is that not correct? P.S. I got rid of it now to avoid any upset/confusion. I understood it wasn't balanced.

Voltage is essentially the electrical energy potential, a higher voltage would mean there was a larger difference between your reducing and oxidising reagent. If this is the case which do you think would be the strongest oxidiser?

I am no expert here, but as the gravitational force of the object (in this case a photon) nears another object let's say a large planet then the photons should be travelling faster towards the planet the closer they are. In this case as an independent observer you should observe the wavelength being stretched, as although we have the planet and photon becoming increasingly closer to one another it is stretching the wavelength because it is "pulling" it in. O | | | | | | | | | | | | ||||||||| If you take the O as a planet and | as points in our wave. Could you see how if this planet was facing directly in front of you it would cause a red shift? Relative to that planet (I am assuming) it would cause a blue shift, but observing another planet you would see a red shift as the photons are slowed down before they exit the planets gravitational pull etc. Here's a nice little article for you C: http://einstein.stanford.edu/content/relativity/q56.html

Woops, yeah you're right, I didn't really think that one through, I was more concentrating on the principle but yes, NaOH doesn't donate H at all. Thanks for the correction! Sorry about that

Hi Alex, I was wondering if you could link the paper that is referred to as on the website as I can't find it. Does this work on similar principles to Hall et al 2009? (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2687991/)

Actually animals do a lot for plants that we take for granted. There are many plant species that are only present due to the activity of animals, animals can graze upon plants, lets say species A, and yes, this may seem like it's not doing that plant a favour and, to be honest it isn't. However it is doing a great deal for species B that is direct competition with species A, if the animal wasn't around to control species A then species B would be competitively excluded. So animals actually do a great deal for plants. Also consider this, animals eat and digest plants, they then excrete and urinate, this provides plants with "unlocked" nutrients, essentially transferring one set of compounds like cellulose (which is hard to catabolise) into a more catabolic form (allowing bacteria to carry the work on etc), this process would be much slower for a plant breakdown had it just died, which locks away useful nutrients that another plant could have potentially used. I must agree with Phi for Alls statement "it's that the whole system works well together" this is key to what has developed, we have evolved alongside plants and the species that once were present in pre cambrian explosion are pretty much preserved only in fossils with one or two exceptions of ancient plants surviving (see Ginkgo biloba for more details), the rest have pretty much moved on evolutionary speaking. These plants have then formed an array of interactions of the millions of years with animals and other plants alike, some for example become dependent on that interaction look at Acacia plants for example (http://www.ice.mpg.de/ext/1057.html),but there are many more examples. Above Strange gave a good example of pollination, another service animals provide from plants. All in all the short of the story is we have evolved alongside these plants like all other animal species around us, therefore we work as a system to interact with one another, the fact we are taking advantage is a mute point. Animals are equally important to plants as plants are to animals, we provide services for them and they provide us with energy... well at least most of them do C;

It's because of the enthalpy of NaOH + H2O -> NaO- + H3O+ is negative. I can't remember the specific values for this but the principles lies behind the Gibbs free energy equation, you can learn a bit more about it here: https://www.chem.tamu.edu/class/majors/tutorialnotefiles/gibbs.htm But essentially the principles are when a system is in a higher set of energy to begin with (the reactants) and ends with a lower energy system afterwards (the products) you get an exothermic reaction. When you dissolute a compound in water it forms complexes with the water depending on how electronegative that compound is the reaction can be minor or large.

This quote refers not to proteins but to RNA transcripts. It is stating that they are in competition for microRNAs (miRNA) in order to suppress expression, as there are only a limited amount of both RNAs and miRNAs. It's a passive yet controlled process by which the complexes formed can inhibit the expression of the RNAs (that can either code for a protein or not) or these complexes can de-attach from the RNAs and allow expression to occur, to which (if coding for a protein) it would be translated into a protein. Talking about competition in the body in general however is a very interesting topic and nice choice of question! There is no lack of competition in or on our body, as you said before about bacterial gut competition. There are many other examples, if you want to break it down into passive and active competition you could say that Haemoglobin proteins passively compete with each other in order to obtain molecule di-oxygen. Yet also you can have virues passively competing for cells with each other in order to hijack the cells metabolism and genome expression. Active examples that come to mind are as mentioned earlier bacterial colonies either in the gut, mouth or skin (depending on the resources used by those bacteria) doesn't really matter where. Another form of active competition is that of the cells, people tend to forget that your cells are constantly competing with each other, it's nice to think that organisms are just a bundle of cells that co-operatively work together in order to achieve a goal (and in some ways yes this is true) but it is also similar that those cells are competing with one another. Sugars, osmolytes, amino acids, all of these are finite resources that are essential for cell functioning, cells actively pump these molecules/compounds in through special proteins in the membrane and are therefore actively competing with one another. The sperm competition is an interesting point. Yes they are competing but also assisting one another to the goal. The cell walls of the ovaries are quite deadly to sperm and those that get caught on the lining create a barrier which prevents their other companions from being killed. Hope this helps to some extent