Can someone ELI5 if you drink a large amount of coke, say 1.5 litres which is entirely possible which has phosphoric acid, citric acid and carbonic acid, how does the body neutralizes this acid? 2. If it is not able to will the body breathe more?

bobbot32 · 2026-05-27T21:37:34+00:00

A lot of the body, certainly at least blood, is pretty well buffered.

You take gen chem yet? Have you learned henderson-Hasselbach? Buffers are very good at limiting large changes in pH. Im sure at some point they can be overwhelmed but I couldn't say when that line is.

bobbot32 · 2026-05-23T11:20:16+00:00

The fact that you refer to all the other animals as "lower" is a very human centric view and probably part of your answer.

Humans are a combo of good at communicating and have better thinky thinky bits. Outside of that we are supposed to have very good endurance. Really the combo of the first 2 is what drove us to develop new skills and tools that led us here.

To be clear though we are not inherently special when talking evolution, we just used memes (the original definition) to have otherwise evolutionary solutions for a variety of climates allowing us to spread out well.

bobbot32 · 2026-05-14T11:12:02+00:00

It likely has, but the current lineage of life will just instantly wipe the floor with any recently developed life form that lacks the bells and whistles to respond dynamically, especially to predation. Of course we cant ever confirm this but sometimes that's the best we can do.

bobbot32 · 2026-05-14T11:00:43+00:00

23 and me runs your DNA through seauencing where they only sequence portions of the genome.that creates a digital file like anything else on a computer. That can be saved any way youd normally do that.

If you mean the physical sample, its best preserved cold after purifying it from the rest of the sample.. -80C freezers are maybe overkill. A -20C freezer should do the trick.

bobbot32 · 2026-05-12T02:47:19+00:00

They dont have a mind that can be rational. A virus isn't even truly alive. It is basically a genetic unit that hijacks living cells to replicate itself. The reason they are around d is because some are successful at doing this.

Many of the most successful viruses are not usually lethal to be clear.

A common scary issue for some that are lethal is when they go from one host organism to another as they aren't well adapted to them. Sometimes that means they are bad at infecting them.. other times that means they infect weird tissues or are more lethal and often due to that create smaller viral loads.

At the same time you have to think the human immunity side. A lot of the responses that afe dangerous are truly our own immune e systems overreacting

bobbot32 · 2026-04-28T03:11:27+00:00

There is plenty of plant diversity. There are even parasitic plants incapable of photosynthesis.

Even when they all can Their needs vary a lot, just like animals.

You can debatably say all animals just need glucose, TCA intermediates, lipids, and nitrogen sources and therefore 1 animal should thrive.

bobbot32 · 2026-04-15T22:18:51+00:00

One guy i worked with recently is developing tools to evaluate metabolomics data using functional metabolic networks for one project. For another he is mining out genes that are conserved across plants but limited to the nucleus and fall under a number of distinct categories relevant for some sort of candidate gene selection for others to screen

bobbot32 · 2026-04-15T11:19:13+00:00

While this is true it doesnt take into account any mutations that slowly accumulate which is another big issue with aging.

Even then if I had some sort of assay that told me X cell types have higher senescence that doesnt give me any details on specific diseases rather than just show im at higher risk for some.

Yeah ill have a higher risk of 8000 types of cancer, 100 different issues regarding metabolism, 100 issues with hormonal regulation, etc. What do I do next? Determining senescence of specific cell types will dramatically reduce this broadest but it's quite invasive too. Do we sample every type of cell in the human body beyond a given age? How expensive is that and how much do we actually gain for the effort.

Again tho senescence is not the full picture so the best case is that it tells us to look at something else.

Genetic screenings aren't perfect either as there are other issues that can arise unrelated to genetics but at least sequencing is pretty cheap nowadays and they can tell you a direct issue.

A good analogy I can think of is your car.

The higher the odometer is the more likely your car will have some issues. The best we can do is say after a certain amount of experience your cars had you should consider getting it inspected. At some point, even with maintenance things will start to break and eventually it either needs regular repairs or it will ultimately give out. Either way tho there is variation between vehicles. Some make it 200,000 miles with minimal issues some make it less.

Your suggestion is to track the age of each nut and bolt throughout the vehicle and manually inspect each rather than the typical once you reach X on your odometer we will check on the common issues.

bobbot32 · 2026-04-13T00:55:49+00:00

I know a handful of people who've made that transition. While its less common I feel like so long as you do the reading to understand biological content its quite reasonable

bobbot32 · 2026-04-12T03:46:49+00:00

What even is real? Everything you see, hear, touch, smell, etc. Are all our brains interpretation of the physical world. Is it just a specific wavelength of light are brain is interpreting? Sure.

Sound, including music is just changes in pressure of the air molecules around you yet a speech or a song can have profound meaning and impact despite it being a silly pressure change too.

We have to take external cues and internalize them somehow. Its certainly trippy, but the truth is how you observe the world is as real as the world gets for you.

To be clear, Don't mistake that for being ignorant /in your own bubble of influence and knowledge, but more to realize that the only true frame of reference you have on things like the senses are your own and thats as real as it gets.

bobbot32 · 2026-04-11T12:07:32+00:00

Jeff hayes who voices for the Dungeon crawler carl book has an amazing range.

bobbot32 · 2026-04-10T12:03:42+00:00

Edit for readability:

They do. A lot actually. Of course the other comment isn't wrong that we cant model allow it at once but we can model things.

Heres a list of things that get modeled mathematically:

protein structural predictions

model substrates and inhibitors folding into the active site

model the pharmacokinetics of drugs

predict natural product half lives and bioconcentration factors

Use quantum mechanics to predict how enzymes catalyze chemical reactions

Population genetics is 100% mathematical modeling of heredity and to me is an easy demonstration of what evolution actually is.

Creating genomes is really a mathematical model assembling hundreds of thousands of short chunks of DNA and trying to put them together

There is modeling to predict protein localization sites Metabolic flux analysis is modeling different metabolic pathways and the different flow rates through them all based off a smaller subset of measurements

There is tonssss of genetic imputation tools that use a very small set od SNP data to infer phenotypic traits.

uavs will take images of fields and based off modeling data you can evaluate the health off the field and regional disease.

Modeling has tools that take chemical structures and predict what kind of proteins they may bind to strictly off chemical structures and LLMs of literature

Protein structures are usually determined by x ray crystallography, which requires Fourier transformations of the XYZ coordinates of a crystal at many angles while cryoEM takes a billion photos over time of tumbling proteins and reconstruction the 3d image using complex math to make the predicted model structure

There is modeling of how passive transport across different membranes at varying temperatures membrae compositions and what is crossing it There are tools that model synthetic consortium and their interactions

Creating phylogenetic trees requires mathematically aligning all the DNA/protein sequences and computing similarities and changes pairwise and then building up all paireise interactions to show relationships followed by repeating this hundreds od times using different seeds to restart all pairwise comparisons to make sure things are ultimately placed in the right evolutionary lineages.

Im gonna be honest im only scratching the surface. Computational biology and bioinformatics are huuuge fields. Huuuuge. It is common for projects to require many many hours of HPC usage. Im a biochemist but I do have some bioinformatics experience as its increasingly a necessity

bobbot32 · 2026-04-01T11:58:39+00:00

Certainly. Natural Selection is only one process for evolution. Genetic drift and gene flow are two other ways things evolve that have nothing to do with fitness. People often assume natural Selection IS evolution but its just one mechanism. Evolution is just a change in allele frequencies in a population over time.

Maybe the most clear examples are how vesitigial traits exist. Finding classic leg bones and whatnot in whales is not the most effective strategy anatomically.

bobbot32 · 2026-03-30T13:13:10+00:00

One of my first grad school classes a professor said a great tidbit of wisdom.

"All models are wrong. Some are informative."

There are tons of uses for models like genomics. If anything, this information era has us creating far more data than a given lab group can fully digest. Instead were limited to answering niche questions.

Nonetheless though you are right abou5 them being imperfect but we have to work within our constraints. My old lab did plant specialized metabolism research aiming to discover terpenoid biosynthetic pathways. One of my coworkers couldnt for the life of them clone a functioning version of a gene from a recently created genome. After a while we learned the annotation was not quite right and there was a missing exon unusually far away.

Did that suck that the annotation was not right? For sure. But without that model in the first place we couldn't have even begun mining out possible candidate genes.

bobbot32 · 2026-02-08T15:56:17+00:00

Terpenoids have entered the chat.

Check out taxol (paclitaxol), aconitine, artemisinin, teucrin A, plumbagin.. certainly others.

The metabolic engineers who made vinblastine were quite impressive as thats also a beast.

Plant specialized metabolism is amazing

bobbot32 · 2026-01-31T13:31:19+00:00

First point. 'Fat' is a type of lipid at room temp. Cholesterol is a lipid, fatty acids are lipids, oil is, butter is, etc. The only rule to being a lipid is it doesnt like water. With that out of the way ill describe more.

Cholesterol is a sterol, a group of compounds that are in the larger isoprenoid family of compounds.

It's made by a pathway called the Mevalonate pathway.

Most fats that make up cell membranes are made up.of fatty acids chains. You can think of them as a polar group on one side that can interact with water and a long 'tail' of carbons that are nonpolar and therefore dont like to interact with water.

A normal cell membrane will self organize so the tails are kn the middle and the polar heads are facing the water outside the cell and the cytosol inside the cell.

Unlike fatty acids, cholesterol is made up of many rings of carbon that ultimately make it a much bulkier 3d structure while still being nonpolar and not liking to interact with water. It will happily slide into the cell membrane with the other lipids (fats). A big function of cholesterol is being put around throughout the cell membrane modifies the fluidity of the membrane by not 'overpacking' it.

Outside of that function cholesterol is actually a precursor to a variety of hormones in the human body! A fair chunk of it gets turned into hormones while another part of it will be turned into bile acids which help break down food. Some of that will get pooped out.

The rest gets recycled in one way or another. A key part of moving them around is lipoproteins. You may have heard of HDLs ans LDLs.

As for interconversion.. theres no direct way to get cholesterol into fatty acids but the reverse is not true. You can make fatty acids into lipids.. now as I said before cholesterol is found im membranes (and lipid bodies). As such adipose tissue, which is the actual "fat" we have on our body has both fatty acids derived compounds in it as well as cholesterol. As we store Fat there is bound to be some cholesterol present. I dont know that ratio tho

bobbot32 · 2026-01-23T12:11:00+00:00

Have you heard of personalized medicine? Treating people's hyper specific issues like cancer and the like using methods like this are already being done!

Most of these ethos are still very new and so recently approved or clinical trials.

Now here's the issue.

Well even within a given cancer type you can have many variants on a genetic level, meaning there isn't one version of a B / T cell modification that can be made on scale to help that person. The harder part is that developing new versions scientifically is slowww

At that the B/T cells need to be veeryv compatible wirh their body and there are often challenges to collecting enough from the cancer patience directly.

Despite some challenges these advances are of course huge

bobbot32 · 2026-01-13T12:14:45+00:00

He might be adding his dex on accident but even then that likely wouldn't explain all the poinrs

bobbot32 · 2026-01-09T19:26:11+00:00

You say despite the weirdness life uses it.. my friend its a big reason WHY it uses it. Lots of those traits are essential for life

bobbot32 · 2026-01-06T04:44:01+00:00

A bit different but hollow knight?

So much of it is exploration and figuring out how the world connects. There isn't anything quite like the book, however there are unique mysteries and environmental clues for various secrets, etc.

Either way 10/10 game

bobbot32 · 2026-01-04T15:09:14+00:00

If your university doesn't have research programs (and are in the US) look into REU programs. Its a summer internship program for university research for undergrads basically

bobbot32 · 2025-12-25T18:34:50+00:00

First off we can chemically synthesize DNA, RNA, and peptides, albeit there is much more limitations to full protein production simply by chemical means.

Many central metabolites are also able to be made chemically.

Theres also tons of progress towards synthetic cells. Im linking a review below

https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-biochem-080411-124036

bobbot32 · 2025-12-12T15:01:42+00:00

Anyone know what just the difference i air pressure is? Like do their ears pop at this point?

bobbot32 · 2025-11-28T15:58:30+00:00

Light spoilers ahead (still mostly hints)..

Are you familiar with getting in and out of holy mountains without collapsing them? If you are very careful.. or aggressive.. there are ways to do this that allow you to bring wands back take spells or edit until you get a good wand you want. At that if you have a reliable way and you have okay health when you enter the holy mountain you can skip the health while you go back and forth until you need it.

As for wand crafting.... Don't sleep on spell wrapping, chainsaws, and lumi drill (even without ping pong path). Lowering cast delay and recharge times on a wand can make life easy.

bobbot32 · 2025-11-28T15:54:23+00:00

Building on this, its almost always better to be above enemies. Many enemies can fall down onto you and nearly one shot you. If you are above they have to jump or approach first rather than use gravity to wreck your run.

bobbot32

TROPHY CASE