exchemist

Or, on the distaff side...... ........cocks.

In Europe, "chickadees" are tits. Some people find those sexy.

Can you expand that a bit? My understanding was that living organisms make protein from RNA, which is made from a DNA template. Can protein be made direct from DNA as well?

I thought this was quite dramatic: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/01/synthetic-life-lab-made-dna-spudcells-scientists It seems these artificial liposomes carry DNA that can make protein (not sure if RNA is involved, having not read the paper), being fed with ATP and nutrients from the growth medium and can actually make (unreliable) copies and cause the cells to divide. That seems fairly extraordinary, if I've understood it correctly. The research paper, which is still a preprint, is here: https://www.biotic.org/research/spudcell/ It seems to trigger cell division via a buildup of protein on the cell wall that eventually makes it split open, so not like the mechanism in living cells. But very intriguing as an exploration of some of the steps by which a version of life could possibly have started.

I bet it is neither. But I’m not watching a Faecebook video.

You mean, if the impossible were possible, would it be possible? Possibly, I suppose. Though as I can’t seem to access more than the abstract of the paper, I can’t really say.

My reading of the passage you quote is that it analyses why such cloaking concepts can’t be made to work.

Don’t we all?!😁

I take it that you struggle with mathematics. 😄

If, which you have not so far established, such blind and deaf people reproduce as much as the average, that would imply that blindness and deafness are no longer very relevant to Darwinian “fitness” in humans. But other traits might be, such as those @CharonY and I have mentioned. So it would not be evidence that natural selection has ceased to operate, just that the selection criteria are different from those in wild animals. However it could equally well be that such blind and deaf people in fact do reproduce less, or even that they selectively abort foetuses in which the defect is present, to avoid having to raise disabled children. So it seems to me we would need some evidence about their rate of reproduction before any conclusion such as the one you are trying to draw could be reached.

@CharonY did actually give a number of examples of environmental selection pressures that affect humanity, in response to a post of mine: climate adaptation, pathogen exposure and metabolic syndromes related to diet that reduce the chance of reproduction. (I might speculate in addition that tolerance to, say, certain pervasive pollutants in the human environment, such as oestrogen mimics, might confer a reproductive advantage.) Such factors are relevant measures of “fitness” in the Darwinian sense for humanity, whereas for example short sightedness arguably no longer is. (This is important to understand. Darwinian “fitness” means suitability to the environment, not closeness to some standard of perceived physical perfection.) One further interesting point he made in that post is that people with a genetic disability cannot be treated as if the disability is their sole contribution to the gene pool of humanity. They also contribute to the width of the gene pool in other respects, which may turn out to have evolutionary advantages at some point.

Ah so it was the hubristic boast that he could clean it up and turn it blue that has caused the trouble. It really could be a metaphor for his entire presidency, as Tim Walz says.

This implies the algal problem has always been there, so nothing has changed. Is that right? Because what I am trying to understand is whether Trump’s tinkering has made it worse or not. If not, why the ballyhoo now?

How would you decelerate the spacecraft at its intended destination?

Has it always been full of algae then? Or if not, what has changed? My impression is that painting the bottom dark blue has somehow made it worse. Or is it that, before, people were solely concerned with the reflection from the surface and didn’t care about the algae, so it is Trump’s insistence on it being blue that has proved to be impossible?

Yes these are all very fair points. Particularly interesting to think about pathogen resistance and metabolic disorders.

Why do you say humans do not seem to be evolving more slowly than wild animals? I should have thought it likely that we are, though I have not seen any data on it.

Haha good catch, I was creating a confused synthesis of the two. Maybe a covfefe moment on my part. 😀

From my reading of the thread other contributors would also agree. What has been called into question seems to be your focus on natural selection as opposed to other mechanisms. But certainly it seems to me we should think about what factors in humanity cause greater or lesser rates of reproduction. In many countries, reproduction rates are now below the mean rate of 2.1 children per woman needed to avoid population decline. But this is a recent development. Given the very slow rate of turnover of human populations (only 3-4 generations per century) one would expect change due to heredity to be an extremely long term effect. So it is probably unwise to extrapolate much from recent social change.

No, for Trump it would have to be gold, in order to create the tacky, dictator bling effect he is addicted to. I actually sometimes wonder if he models himself on Arno Goldfinger. He resembles him physically, like Goldfinger he cheats at golf and he has even hired an Oddjob lookalike, in Steven Cheung.

Yes we all agree it is different for humans. One point I have not seen made yet is that we even consciously control whether or not we reproduce. The birth rate drops in human populations as women’s opportunities for work improve and contraception becomes available to them. Since the engine of evolution is reproductive “success”, once reproduction is no longer necessarily seen as a “success” and you can decide not to, that can be expected to have an impact on the direction evolution takes. I’ve seen it suggested that brighter women have fewer children, which may make the human race more stupid over time. 😄

First, as @KJW points out, the opening post is purely concerned with the physics of propulsion (and deceleration), which apply regardless of what is transported. Second, My comment about “”vanishingly unlikely” was a response to you suggesting the point of the exchanges on this thread could be to account for some aspect of current UAPs. In that context “colonisation” can be dismissed, since we have not been colonised. That leaves only reconnaissance. Which does require communicating findings back to the sender.

Firstly, I refer you to the opening post. Secondly, any journey would take so long that it would be pointless. No information could ever be sent back unless the senders were willing to wait for hundreds of thousands of years. And then what would they do with it? In space travel the numbers are awful. That’s why scenarios for alien visitation necessarily involve some magic macguffin that violates the principles of current physics.

They have even arrested a guy for stopping to pick up a bit of the peeling paint. Reality must be made to conform to Trump’s fantastic lies. But he’s a former Olympic canoeist, 67 years old, and not even black, so they will struggle to sustain the narrative that he’s vandalising the pool. I’m a bit surprised the parks police would stoop to this but maybe they are all Trumpy.

To make matters worse, at least according to something I have read, painting the pool dark blue has made it reflect the sunlight less well so the water gets warmer, further encouraging algal bloom. A real 6-cylinder cock-up.