CharonY

I think this type of lazy thinking is far more prevalent than you give it credit for, and not necessarily linked to religion (even if it might condition one to do so). In many cases, it seems like a protective mechanism to: avoid complicated feelings or the work needed to work through them and to protect and validate deeply held beliefs. I will remind you of (ex)members on this forum who were able to work to complicated questions even vaguely in their area of expertise but went off the handle once it came to issues they deeply disagreed with. Consistency seems to be more the exception (and requires more work) than the norm. I think that prior to the age of oversharing we secretly held the assumption that the folks we surround ourselves with are at least vaguely in line with what we are thinking (hence the old wisdom of no politics or religion at the dinner table).

That doesn't really answer my question. What does ownership mean in this context. Administering it like a colony or incorporating it into the country? In the latter case the "original" Swedes, for example would be a minority in the resulting country. The former is a bit problematic. Even with best intentions, a power differential and lack of self-governance will inevitably lead to issues. I mean, can you imagine Danes ruled by Swedes? The bloodshed (and alcohol poisoning) would be unfathomable.

That is not always the case- it is more a rough tendency, which is not always correct. In quite a few parasites, the reproductive fate of a parasite is not coupled to their hosts, so they do not benefit from the host being alive longer (or conversely, there is no disadvantage for them to kill them- as long as they do not run out of hosts). In fact, in some cases the death of the host is a necessary part of their life cycle. Some fungi, for example, feed on their insect host until they are pretty much spent, then cause them seek a high point for maximum spore dispersal. Certain horsehair worms infect their hosts brain and cause them to drown, so that the worm can get into water and lay eggs. Some parasites have to change hosts during their lifecycle and either cost their first to die (or compel them to get eaten) so that they can get to their second one. Sometimes the opposite happens. Plasmodium falciparum, which causes malaria, is harmless to mosquitos, but an be quite deadly in their final host.

More details needed. Do you mean to say that which political system you want to apply to the rest of the world (i.e. they basically become one nation) or whether each of the individual countries should rule like colonizers.

As stated before: nope. Astonishingly, this short sentence manages to be wrong on multiple levels. Going backward, the retina is not composed of DNA, DNA is not ionized by (visible) light. At most there is photoexcitation by UV which can lead to DNA lesions, but not ionization. Taken together, it seems that you do not understand what ionization means, especially in the context of biomolecules. Also during photosynthesis there is no ionization by light, either. The electron flow is driven by conformation changes within the system that ultimately allow the extraction of electrons and protons from water. The light energy powers these changes but does not ionize the photosystem. I am not sure, are you just having a bit of fun of mushing words together that you don't quite understand?

I think I would say potential rather than possibility. The latter could also include likelihood of exposure (probably).

I wonder whether that is because the views are sufficiently superficial that things could be argued either way? The issue I feel is that generally speaking a consensus can only form if folks use the same basis, and arrive at least at a set of conclusions. One might disagree in the areas of uncertainties, but at least agree on the same set of facts. This, however, is no longer the case. Especially when we look at social media, including youtube. I think when wikipedia came up tech folks argued that social media and all the free information would disrupt science and our general understanding of the world. I think they were right, just not in the way they thought they would be.

Wilson was more known for his work on sociobiology (which is not really much of a thing as a whole), plus some more problematic opinions outside. There is a bit of a rush of fairly recent work on cephalopod cognition. I think papers really started to ramp up only after 2000 and some of the authors that pop up are Jennifer Mather, Anil Seth and more recently Alexandra Schnell.

There is also a lot of individual variation. Some of my dogs seeing a mirror the first time were at least curious, others basically immediately dismissed, one of the dumber ones barked a few times before realizing that no one else was reacting and so on. One of the issues that are often not documented (because they don't make a good hypothesis-driven paper) is that animals fail tasks because they are simply not interested.

In my own biased opinion, I always assumed that we underestimate animal intelligence. In part, because we cannot help but view it through our own experiences and hence, assume that anything closer to us (in appearance and behaviour) must also be more intelligent. A change is coming in that regard, though: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7555673/ When I did my undergrad, I was highly skeptical of some of the tests (such as the mirror test) as it presumes something about the animal (e.g. that the visual cue has any relevance to them). Moreover, typically only few animals are used in behavioural studies. If we were to study human behaviour, we would not (or at least should not) overinterpret the outcome. Yet, in animal studies folks often assume that there is less individual difference. I think most pet owners know that there is a lot of individual differences and only fairly recently studies have started to push to a change in the perspective of animal behaviour analysis.

No worries, I don't disagree. But expertise (at least in science) tends to coalesce around some kind of firm consensus, surrounded by wobblier, but still fairly bits and then areas where experts should state that things are speculative. I do know (especially with recent experience) that this is not always the case and some folks really are loud outside their field. So in that regard I understand that folks can be uncertain regarding who they should believe. However, that there is more recent trend to ignore consensus and expertise altogether and treat even the most ridiculous things as equivalent to even minimal levels of expertise. We went from opinions with insufficient data/understanding straight to 5G aliens did it. And that part worries me, as it essentially renders facts entirely non-relevant.

Worse than that. Somehow managed to delete the negation, too. Fixed now.

This great man phenomenon is unfortunately ubiquitous and is probably amplified with the celebrity thingy. Folks for some reason feel that they know a person if they seem the often enough and trust what is being said. Interestingly the exact opposite but also somehow convergent effect is happening within online communities. Despite not being seen, the mere repetition of factoids, can make them true and trusted facts. Both are part of the demise of expertise.

I think it is fair to say that not many scientists are very aware of changes outside their specific fields. I think the point still stands that folks are bad at overall risk assessment (for good reasons, but still). We are more willing to invest and change our behaviour to address rare but scary events rather than address other risks which we feel safe about, without good reason.

In developed countries electricity and the transport make biggest bulk of greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture in Canada, for example makes up around 8% of all greenhouse gas emissions (mostly in forms of methane, associated with meat production, I believe). Conversely, transport and energy is about is about 50%. For transportation I do not have more detailed values at hand, but an average the estimate is about 60% for personal transportation. I don't know how much food Canada sends out in help, but I doubt the associated GHG emissions are going to make much of a blip.

It is also part of psychology that roughly falls into the framework of evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately any studies there suffer from reproducibility, coupled with theoretical overreach. I.e., a system where far-ranging hypotheses and even theories are propped up by insufficient data. It does not mean that the theories are wrong per se, but the studies that are supposed to support them are too limited to actually achieve that. The study in question has multiple issues right off the bat. The menstrual cycle and fertility is based on fairly rough estimates (no blood tests, for example), and while the authors acknowledge some perimenstrual issues (e.g. cramps, nausea, irritability, thermoregulation and so on) they kind of waved it off by assuming that they are only happening in the luteal phase. What more recent has shown is that focusing only on the fertility aspect creates blinders for the wide range of hormonal changes which affect overall physiology in an array of ways. Mood changes are likely caused by relative fluctuations of steroids throughout the menstrual cycle, which in turn affect the ability or interest in individuals to draw out money from their customers.

Posted in wrong forum, please disregard.

Technology basically facilitates tendencies and the issue is that especially younger folks are used to the instant gratification offered by things like technology (essentially everyone is carrying a dopamine machine with them at all times). I think we are a bit late in the game for that. The next generation of teachers are already not used to that anymore. In addition, the commodification of education and the increasing view of students as clients is starting to erode education in university as well. Educators in many systems across the world are struggling now to instill critical thinking skills and while it was already deteriorating over last decades, the COVID-19 pandemic has created a bit of a jump which makes things just way more visible otherwise. The reality is that we don't need an oppressive government or system to achieve those goals. That was very much a post WWII type of thinking. Now we have methods to do it voluntarily to ourselves, driven by capitalism, rather than political ideologies.

There are some attempts in that direction, mostly targeted at toxic VOCs. From what I recall, it seems that likely microbes are responsible for oxidizing some of the VOCs and breaking them down . But I don't think that algae were shown to do that. Conversely, I vaguely remember that some algae actually release VOCs (though I cannot recall whether those were in any form harmful). The provided link paints a very poor picture of the capabilities of the company, considering they are conflating CO2 capture with capture of harmful substances (via photosynthesis, no less). Failing that much at basic biochemistry does not inspire confidence. The blurb also seem to suggest that this is just an exhibit, likely putting some algae (or even just a green liquid) into a stand. A real bioreactor for cyanobacteria or algae needs quite a bit more to work. And randomly growing cyanobacteria can also produce toxic microcystins. So there is also that. From what I remember the carbon yield (for fuel or plastic production) was also rather low. I am also skeptical that oxygen production from those volumes would be significant, but I may be wrong.

I believe the iron clusters got oxidized and destabilized under oxygen. CO is also an inhibitor and it actually binds to nitrogenases like haemoglobin, IIRC. As a side note, oxidizing and often destabilizing iron cores is one of the ways many organisms sense oxygen and quite a few regulatory factors related to oxidative stress (and also iron metabolism) are using that. Well, you could have started them! I am just sitting here, looking at physics threads and pretend to understand what swansont is explaining.

One recent worrying finding is that a cat was found to be infected, likely due to consumption of contaminated raw milk. I.e. the virus might get better at jumping from mammal to mammal, which obviously is really bad news for us (humans). https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/30/7/24-0508_article

Among those, Fe plays an outsized role for tons of redox reactions. But some of the rarer ones (including Mo and Va) have been utilized in rather critical enzymes and have not been replaced by more common metals, which in itself is interesting. If you are interested, there are whole fields on metalloenzymes, with recent approaches how various moieties in these large enzyme complexes might move during the various electron transfer processes. Not entirely my world, but it pops up frequently (and sometimes you get to work with folks on things like these). And also the work with them is annoying, just getting your media and glass ware free of metals is a nightmare.

You keep forgetting photosynthetic and other autotrophic organisms that are not plants.

There is another hint: nitrogenase are sensitive to oxygen so they do not work well if too much oxygen is present. From what I remember, nitrogen is thought to be limiting during evolution of early life and the ability to fix nitrogen would have been a massive benefit. Nitrogenases and their cofactors (especially FeMoCo) have a massive body of lit (and I dabbled a bit with it as a grad student) so there is a lot to read on this topic :).

I may be wrong but I think the general assumption is that it is the most likely nitrogen source used by early life.