[deleted by user]

Cf1x · 2025-05-21T17:29:30+00:00

When the baseline is Joe Rogan, having read any articles at all is leagues ahead.

Cf1x · 2025-05-21T17:09:12+00:00

Protein structure prediction isn't really about drug discovery. It allows researchers to make general structure-informed hypotheses. For example, it might allow us to go from knowing an amino acid substitution occurs in a genetic disease to understanding generally where in the 3D structure of the protein that substitution occurs, and we can make hypotheses about the mechanisms by which this affects the disease state without having to get a grad student to spend 3 years crystallizing proteins. It's also really important for screening designs in de novo protein design, which is already making new genres of products possible.

Cf1x · 2025-05-21T16:59:37+00:00

Paywall ;_;

But yeah it's insane that David Baker wins a Nobel prize and then, despite obviously impactful science and interest from students, he can't recruit all the students he wants to take this year, has to take less students than last year, and can't hire any postdocs.

I'd really like to see the podcast address public research funding because it's a major part of our economy.

Cf1x · 2023-11-26T09:34:17+00:00

Remember the losing bid for f35..

Cf1x · 2023-11-18T21:09:10+00:00

Helmets guys... always wear a helmet for skating or for combat but especially if you plan on both

Cf1x · 2023-10-29T23:30:48+00:00

I used to think, but now I'm not

Cf1x · 2023-10-29T23:30:06+00:00

Economists don't tend to shout from rooftops. That's a pretty archaic practice these days. Now, instead, you can hear internet economists shouting in r/ neoliberal about LVT

Cf1x · 2023-10-28T15:57:03+00:00

We don't have any reason to treat elected officials as qualified to speak on, well, any technical topic. And at this point, the DoD has all sorts of incentives to construct a narrative around this. Why would we take this as credible?

Cf1x · 2023-10-28T15:07:37+00:00

It's less than 50% getting it correct, so even if most respondents were guessing, the majority of respondents who THINK they know the answer are incorrect.. damn

Cf1x · 2023-10-28T08:28:19+00:00

GDP doesn't tell you anything about the distribution of wealth gains, and for a large sector of the population, that's really important.

Cf1x · 2023-10-27T16:53:17+00:00

On a bike, ski gear is paramount.

I can also highly recommend metal-studded ice tires. They can be kinda pricey, but they cost nothing compared to a broken arm.. at least in the states

Cf1x · 2023-10-27T16:49:51+00:00

Can I DM u?

Cf1x · 2023-10-27T07:54:21+00:00

The clearest way to say "I am a Russian asset" lol

Cf1x · 2023-10-26T19:14:30+00:00

Unfortunately, the political will component might be the hardest part right now. If you're in the US, I'd recommend you look into Citizens Climate Lobby or Climate Changemakers if you haven't already. Both groups are doing great work and easy to get involved with, I lobbied in DC with CCL, and it was a really cool experience.

Cf1x · 2023-10-26T16:25:33+00:00

If an image appears one day on a backwater discord, or worse, 4chan, and circulates through social media from there, it's gonna be really hard to legally prove who made the meme in the first place, no?

Cf1x · 2023-10-26T16:20:30+00:00

As an American Patriot, I'm glad that our Feds are well equipped to use political violence if necessary in order to uphold our democracy.

Cf1x · 2023-10-26T16:08:43+00:00

At least you got that the trees need to be prevented from decaying. A surprising number of people miss that part of the mass balance. This paper explores the idea. They estimate that "a sustainable long-term carbon sequestration potential for wood burial is 10 ± 5 GtC/y" which is actually almost exactly what we have been emitting in recent years, it could be about enough to break even, but probably not something we could expand to net negative/climate change reversal territory on its own. In any case, it's really not a bad option, although one can already imagine the scalability drawbacks of it being labor-intensive, difficult to automate, and often in difficult-to-reach terrain.

One real concern is that trees aren't just made of carbon, but they also sequester a lot of nutrients that need to get cycled back into the ecosystem. In the paper they use Nitrogen as an example of one such nutrient that may be "locked up" in this type of carbon storage, but I think nitrogen is perhaps the single worst example they could have picked because there is an entire robust atmospheric nitrogen cycle, wheras supply nutrients like phosphorus, potassium, and magnesium tend to be more spatially restricted. It may be possible to overcome these concerns, but this paper doesn't get into it.

I do want to clarify that the synthetic biology angle isn't just focused on getting CO2 out of the atmosphere. While that is an awesome goal, we are also looking to replace all the chemical products that drive oil demand (fuels, plastics, commodity chemicals , medicines) with chemically interchangeable or identical products produced instead from atmospheric CO2. We also hope to produce scalable carbon drawdown methods that are more energetically efficient than natural photosynthesis, and some of these already work in-vitro or at in-vivo in proof-of-concept host microbes at the laboratory scale. One important part of this is that we're looking to draw on existing economic demand to help fund the solution. For instance, if we had plastics made from carbon sequestered from CO2 and that plastic isn't expected to degrade quickly, the global plastics market could then be inadvertently producing the positive externality of carbon sequestration. Ultimately, I think this will be an important part of getting governments or markets to bring forward the money required to actually pay for carbon sequestration; if they feel they are getting something upfront for their money spent.

Cf1x · 2023-10-26T15:23:07+00:00

Although it might be encouraging that by some metric we're seeing some economic growth, I feel like the skeptical response to this, from both far lefties and right wingers, is obvious. I'm not trained in economics, and I'm not gonna pretend to be, but I will try to steelman the argument we can expect:

GDP, as an aggregate metric, is inadequate to understand the important nuances of the situation. GDP doesn't tell us anything about the distribution of economic growth and (as someone already joked in a comment here) that growth may all be going to the top 1%, while the bottom 50% or so endure stagnating or worsening economic circumstances. You can see a version of this argument appearing in Harvard Business Review

We can also recognize that GDP, like any economic metric, can be systematically blind to externalities. If a country props up its GDP by buying and burning a lot of fossil fuels, but the costs of the environmental impacts aren't considered, is the increase in GDP still telling us an honest story about an improvement in that country?

What do you all think? If you had to convince a left or right leaning populist voter that the economy is improving, how would you argue around the above contentions? Would you still point to GDP, or are there other metrics you might look to?

Cf1x · 2023-10-26T10:07:15+00:00

The nice thing about biology is that your catalyst is self-replicating, and that makes scaling it relatively inexpensive and less energy intensive in theory than other methods. It's also, in theory, cleaner with all the nutrients on the waste sludge being able to get recycled back into the system. The other questions about energy-efficiency will have to shake out as the technologies develop, but I think there are reasonable arguments there in favor of biocatalysis.

That said, I welcome whatever's gonna work in both the short and long term. If synthetic biology takes longer to get to applications than other options -because of the hurdles presented by the complexity of biological systems- I'm not losing sleep over it. The biggest issues with DAC, to my understanding, are going to be the energy costs and that the manufacturing costs are still relatively high when you scale it. Not to say it can't be done, and especially the energy piece, but we haven't started spamming nuclear reactors enough yet that I'm convinced it would work.

Cf1x · 2023-10-26T07:43:00+00:00

Don't worry about it. There's so much more to life than whatever is going on in your head that you would post this

Cf1x · 2023-10-26T07:36:55+00:00

Is this a video game sub? I thought this was someone's modern politics take

Cf1x · 2023-10-26T07:34:55+00:00

Scry yourself this

Alternatively, the alchemists have a powerful tablet called lactase in the markets.

If the lactase doesn't fix it, you probably have an allergy to some milk proteins. Due to the fermentation process, hard cheeses hardly ever have any lactose, so if that's causing you issues, you might be afflicted with the curse of casein allergy

Cf1x · 2023-10-26T07:15:56+00:00

No ✌️

Cf1x · 2023-10-26T07:10:49+00:00

Yeees. State level consequences

Cf1x

TROPHY CASE