Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

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Tuco

I got Tuco'd!
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NASA press conference just a few hours ago told details of the most Earth-like exoplanet thus far discovered:

Earth 2.0: What we know about Kepler 452b, the most Earth-like planet ever discovered - Science - News - The Independent

but its 1400 light years away, so almost certainly discover a closer Earth-like planet before we'd ever make it there.
Given that we just found out basic information about pluto, as a layman I am totally suspicious about any information we have about a planet that is 1400ly away. My understanding is that they look at how a star wobbles based on its orbiting planets, but I feel like without having a way to test those calculations and technology on anything other than our solar system, it's an unproven method.

However, I know even less about astrophysics as I do about molecular biology (see previous post).
 

hodj

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The thing I don't think I'm grasping is that--when the bonds form, they produce more energy than they take in, right?
Usually when a bond forms, it doesn't produce energy, it takes in energy. Bond breakage is what releases energy (there are probably exceptions to this but not any we need to worry about here)

So, our puddle--which has a goal of reducing the energy in its system into a non-usable form
There is no goal (as in, no conscious desire for either increased entropy or decreased entropy on the part of the puddle) and/but what happens is that living molecules allow much less energy to be lost to entropy than would otherwise occur, which is why an organized energy increase is favored. (See below for my addendum to this statement, because its not exactly accurate)

I'm not getting something obvious here--I pretty much understand that. I'm just looking for what it is. (I'm going to guess looking at the puddle as a system is myopic because it's not actually closed ect. But the core of it is, if you've got sunlight increasing energy, and this theory states the drive for "life" is to better use that energy up
This is where your error is. The drive for living molecules allows the energy to be converted more efficiently, so less is lost to entropy.

Recently I've been tempted to go back to school for a more STEM oriented degree (Complete the higher end math courses I took, and try for Chem or Phys),
Do both! Dual major in Chem/Phys!

Added: Let me amend what I'm saying a bit. By better organizing the energy, it IS better dissipated, so in that regards, more is lost to entropy over time, but in the process it is being used more efficiently. So when I say that the energy is more organized and therefore less is being lost to entropy, what I mean by that is that the energy that is being injected into the system from outside is goes through more changes and is used for more work before it is lost as entropy.

Think about it like this. The Sun is firing all this energy at this puddle. Now that energy can hang out for a few minutes, and then be lost as heat energy, or molecules can harvest that energy and convert it to work to power their reactions, and then portions of that energy are lost as heat energy or entropy. Which is more efficient in terms of the energy being used for work? The latter. So that's what drives this. The molecules are harvesting the energy and using it, instead of it just being lost to entropy.

Hopefully that better clarifies what I mean.

Here's a copy of Jeremy England's paper on the subject, he being a physicist and in post grad probably can explain it better than I can

http://www.englandlab.com/uploads/7/...013jcpsrep.pdf
 

pharmakos

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Hodj, Iannis and Dumar are all equally wrong because the subset of RNA that forms lysterine through bianually linked TRT strands can form causalities through triple stranded nuclear pairs.
tuco gets it.

Given that we just found out basic information about pluto, as a layman I am totally suspicious about any information we have about a planet that is 1400ly away. My understanding is that they look at how a star wobbles based on its orbiting planets, but I feel like without having a way to test those calculations and technology on anything other than our solar system, it's an unproven method.

However, I know even less about astrophysics as I do about molecular biology (see previous post).
basically all we can guess about that planet is its mass, distance from its host star, and how long it takes to revolve around that star. and yeah, we could be getting our guesses completely wrong due to some unforseen variable.
 

Lithose

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This is where your error is. The drive for living molecules allows the energy to be converted more efficiently, so less is lost to entropy.
Humm, this is probably it then. I thought he was saying that since entropy is a driving force, the environment favors anything that aids in the conversion of energy into unusable forms; IE whatever facilitates entropy. (I use the term goal, but I'm not indicating consciousness--rather just another way of saying the path of least resistance, or what the system is prone to do.)...Maybe I completely misunderstood a fundamental there. But I was looking at it like that, like the environment was favoring molecules which aided in entropy, in reducing the usable energy in the system, not resisting that force.
 

hodj

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Humm, this is probably it then. I thought he was saying that since entropy is a driving force, the environment favors anything that aids in the conversion of energy into unusable forms; IE whatever facilitates entropy. (I use goal, but I'm not indicating consciousness--rather just another way of saying the path of least resistance, or what the system is prone to do.)...Maybe I completely misunderstood a fundamental there.
It does, the way I'm approaching it is probably a little counter intuitive, I've amended my previous post a few times to clarify.

Over all, at the end of the process, more energy is lost to entropy, but in the process of doing that, more energy is used for work, and this is thermodynamically favored. Check out the paper I just linked in the last post by England, it probably approaches it in a more direct way that makes it more comprehensible.
 

Lithose

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Awesome, thanks, I think it's clicking now in terms of the big picture of the energy being used more efficiently than just bleeding out, going to read that on the way home.
 

hodj

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Awesome, thanks, I think it's clicking now in terms of the big picture of the energy being used more efficiently than just bleeding out, going to read that on the way home.
Glad to help. Sorry if I made it more confusing in a way.

in a way, life is an anti-entropic force.
Right that's how I'm describing it. In the long term, of course, we exude an immense amount of energy as heat/entropy, for instance, and there are people looking at ways to do things like power cell phones with body heat and such.

It depends on how you're looking at the system. Physicists look it at in the system wide scope, biologists look at it at a more individual/organismal level, so that's where the difference in viewpoint is coming from.
 

iannis

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Why would triple stranding make any of that wrong? From what I remember triple stranding is less chemically stable than doublestranding and would make a poor medium when you're trying to create a method of genetic modification. Not to mention that we aren't triple stranded to begin with so it's hypothetical research at best. All I'm saying is that in order to make CRISPIER work they're going to require a tool which does not exist. One which they are probably going to have to create. Which is what the guys who ran the experiment working on CRISPIER themselves have basically said. That might be a really direct tool in the form of some kind of filter, or it might be a methodological tool that they wind up devising.

The origin of life? I guess triple stranding does have a bearing on that. I don't know. My money would be that it probably went --> lots of carbon and nitrogen in a puddle --> nucleotides --> viroids --> virus --> sheathed virus (nothing self-replicating yet) --> sheathed virus colony (phospolipid bilayer, the magic happened) --> rudimentary differentiating cell, but still not truly self-replicating... more of a scavenger --> billions of generations --> something that resembles a self-replicating cell with cellular organelles and function. But panspermia could be correct too, and the first seed of RNA could have hitched a ride here in the tail of a comet. The main thing is that you have enough stability to allow truly minute tendencies to create their patterns. I don't think that lightening struck a puddle of goo and all of a sudden life. I think that puddle of goo sat in basically the same spot, being fed organics (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen) and energy (sunlight or any sort of heat really) and over the course of hundreds of thousands if not millions of years... all of a sudden life. And yea, you could throw a triple stranding phase in there and have it still come out with doublestranding dominant.
 

iannis

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Small iterative changes over the span of time too great to personally fathom. And enough stability that the host medium didn't evaporate away or deplete its resources while it was busy in the process of intelligently designing itself.

I do think that if we took a sterile plastic box full of water and put it in a clean room with a sunlamp on it and left it there for about 200,000 years when they came back to check on it they'd probably find viruses.

There -have- to be anti-entropic forces in the fabric of reality. Otherwise it doesn't make any sense how we exist. No one is that lucky, ya know? But that's the going myth. We're just lucky. The universe will end in heat death.

And it happened here with carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. But really stability and energy are the keys. CHO are common as shit in our system, so maybe that's why that happened. Maybe not -- most with least -- maybe CHO is mandatory. There very well could be other mediums used to express that self-replication and anti-entropy. There could be discorporate plasma demons living in the layers of the sun. They could be elder gods, one of their thoughts encompassing the entirety of a man's life, dark and terrible to us.
 

pharmakos

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actually i liked a lot of the ideas you wrote in those two posts, but tuco was trolling when he mentioned the triple strand thing

your first clue should have been that lysterine is the name of a mouthwash, not the name of an amino acid =p
 

iannis

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I just remember we had an entire lecture on triple stranding.

I think our prof wrote one for himself.