Your body is made of proteins. In the broadest sense, there are structural proteins and proteins that make important things. Some of the proteins that make things (called enzymes) require additional special molecules in order to function properly. These special molecules are called vitamins. Our bodies can make several vitamins but can’t make several other ones. The ones we can’t make has to be eaten, otherwise the enzyme won’t be able to function properly, and depending on what the enzyme does, you’ll either get sick or die or both. Vitamin C has to be eaten. Vitamin D, our bodies can produce. But the process to make it requires sunlight in order to function.

TL;DR: our bodies have evolved to force you to touch grass

There’s actually debate over whether America was actually named after Amerigo Vespucci. My understanding is that it was likely just a coincidence that his name is so similar to America. As I understand it, it was actually named after a tribe of native Americans. But native Americans don’t pass the Republican scale of whiteness, so they’ll probably try to rename America anyways. I’m calling it now: they’re going to rename it to Trumpia

You might need to be more specific on what you’re asking

More of an antimeme than a BHJ imo

I don’t understand how what you said isn’t burying one’s head in the sand

It seems to me that the wording itself is unimportant, but rather the intention. So I would imagine no

I think we can relatively easily figure out what kinks the author of Fifty Shades of Gray has

Have you heard of Roko’s Basilisk? Basically, if we were in a simulation, it’s best not to acknowledge it

currently doing PhD

happy with topic

no mention about happiness with life

Yeah that sounds about right

Smoking introduces a lot more chemicals than just nicotine. A lot of health hazards associated with smoking are from the smoke itself, not the nicotine. Vaping allows you to remove the smoke part of the equation. (Vaping also introduces a bunch of hazards on its own, but it’s still overall better than smoking)

I think you might be confusing the many worlds hypothesis with something else. Many worlds doesn’t explain why the fundamental variables of the universe are the way they are, it describes the wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics. It’s one of the most logical conclusions of the double slit experiment (Many worlds is the hypothesis that says that the particle passes through both slits)

Yes, I do, but only because the other theories make even less sense. The 3 main interpretations of the observations made by quantum mechanics are the Copenhagen interpretation, the pilot wave theory, and the many worlds hypothesis. They’re made to explain the weirdness of wave-particle duality

The Copenhagen interpretation is the most accepted interpretation, and it (essentially) states that particles are just waves until they are observed, which collapses the wave back into a particle. In other words, the wave is a physical, real thing.

The pilot wave theory says that the particle stays a particle, and the wave that we observe is just a wave of probability that “pushes” the particle along, like a surfer being pushed by a tidal wave.

The many worlds hypothesis agrees with the pilot wave theory in saying that the wave isn’t a physical thing, but says that the wave of probability exists because the particle is being split across multiple timelines, and we can only observe 1 timeline, thus making the particle inherently probabilistic.

Out of the 3, the many worlds hypothesis makes the most sense to me. But I don’t believe in it in the way that people think about it colloquially. The particle splitting is an extremely small event, so there’s probably like a billion timelines that are just exactly like the current one

Divisive topic and comment section, but IMO that feels like a fair change. No stance on this topic will ever not be divisive, but I think this is probably the most impartial stance that could be taken

Yup, it’s always been funny to me. Got a sandwich style ITX case, I like being able to see my GPU

That’s fine. 4 hours isn’t enough to really get into the meat of the game yet. If you feel like you’re kinda stumbling around a bit without quite knowing what the goal of the game is, that’s normal. The game is specifically designed to not give you any objectives, and a big part of making the game enjoyable is to not try to judge the game by regular game design conventions. There are no win conditions, no lose conditions, no objectives, and the game becomes much more enjoyable if you just play the game in the way that you think makes the most sense. You’ll just need to have a bit of faith that there is actually an end, you just never get told how to get to the end.

If you’re struggling with not crashing, then that’s a different issue altogether, and honestly my advice is to just use autopilot. Make sure to disable autopilot if you start to see that autopilot is going to crash you into the sun.

Outer Wilds. Any explanation that I give would be massive spoilers, but it captures a genre, aesthetic, and theme that, in my experience, has been virtually unused by any other game before and still remains extremely underutilized

Even just opening the link can leak info - I would avoid doing so entirely unless your device is sandboxed

Contramuffin
AP Biology
Mrs. Setters
1 December 2024

          How cells respond to different doses of drugs 

Purpose: The purpose of this experiment is to see whether cells respond differently when exposed to different doses of the same drug. 

Hypothesis: The drugs will work the best at the highest dosage, but it won't work at the lowest dosage. 

Alternate hypothesis: All of the dosages work equally well. 

Materials:
* Cells
* 48-well plate
* Cell media 
* Recording device 
* Micropipettes
* Micropipette tips (a lot) 
* Serological pipers (a lot) 
* Serological piper pump
* Cell culture hood
* Drug (5 mg) 
* DMSO (5 mL) 
* PBS (5 ml) 
* Stimulus (500 uL) 
* PCR strip (2)

Procedure:
1. Using the cell culture hood, put cells and cell media into a 48-well plate
2. Put the plate into a recording device and start recording
3. Dilute drugs to the correct concentrations with DMSO
4. Put the drugs and the stimulant and the PBS into PCR strips for easier usage later
5. Stop the recording and put drugs into the plate 
6. Wait 30 minutes
7. Put stimulant or PBS into the plate 
8. Resume recording
9. After several days, stop the recording

Results: The cells died :'(

Conclusions: Science is hard

Herbal medicines are fine for minor things, but I wouldn’t use that for serious issues. Dosage is a big part of a medicine’s effectiveness, and a lot of the time, natural products have compounds that are too low in concentration to be reasonably effective. You’d need to extract and purify the compound, and at that point you’re right back to conventional medicine.

And that’s assuming that the herbs do contain the compound that you’re looking for, because unfortunately, people lie on the internet and I generally would not trust what random internet people say about what’s in herbal medicines

OK, so this is an interesting question. To start, I’m a circadian researcher, specifically focusing on how bacteria can influence our circadian clocks.

It is indeed correct that most animals utilize the sky (specifically, the ambient brightness) to determine the time. But the circadian clock is incredibly entrenched. It evolved ages ago, and so by extension, virtually every single animal inherited the same circadian clock (with some modifications). Animals as distinct as fruit flies, fish, and humans have similar circadian clocks. And the circadian clock is unbelievably important, more than people give it credit for. Night and day are incredibly different environments, and every single animal needs to be able to predict and accommodate for the cold that comes at night and the UV radiation that comes during the day. And there’s a plethora of other, subtle changes to the environment that we don’t fully understand yet. For instance (and probably a bit unsurprising in hindsight), the population of bacteria in the air changes at day versus at night. Soil bacteria, for some reason, act differently at day versus at night. Presumably plants (which are definitely circadian) are influencing the soil bacteria in some way through their roots, but it’s not entirely clear.

An interesting consequence of the importance of the circadian clock is that animals have evolved multiple, redundant ways of telling time. If you lock a person in a dark box for weeks to months (scientists have performed this experiment in the past), the circadian clock running within the person is still able to somewhat-accurately tell the time, and we can use experiments like this to tease apart how the circadian clock utilize different cues to figure out the right time. One of the more interesting cues (and the one that I research) is how our bodies use surrounding bacteria to tell the time. And it’s known that eating food affects the circadian clock. Food availability, of course, is pretty circadian, especially if you eat food that is circadian. If a mouse comes out at night, then there’s no point hunting for mice in the day. I’m not too knowledgeable about deep sea animals (I’m really more focused on mammals), but a quick literature search suggests that deep sea animals do have circadian clocks, inherited from the same ancient ancestors that we got ours from. The conclusions appear to be similar to what I’ve said above - namely, that even if there’s no sky, having a functional circadian clock is necessary simply because other things, such as food, are themselves circadian.

So my answer is, presumably, that deep sea animals can already accurately tell the time, presumably by keeping track of when they last ate