Leaderboard

Linus Pauling was a brilliant chemist, he won the Nobel Prize, but he also championed the theory that Vitamin C in megadoses was a miracle treatment, which turned out to be nonsense. All the world got from Pauling's "vitamin therapy" was a mass increase in kidney stones for several years. This kind of thing, where eminent researchers stray outside their area of expertise, happens a lot.

Whether something is a colony or not is not a clearcut biologycal category in my opinion. Endosymbiosis* changed that picture, and while we still talk about "organisms", the distinction is blurry at best. Kelp is a multicellular protist. Eukaryotes have plastids (genetically-independent inclusions). I consider myself a colony that includes intestinal bacteria, my mom's mitocondria, etc. Yet my liver is on the right because my homeobox genes ordered developmental hormones that made my stem cells put it there. *Among other things. 'My liver is on the right' is chirality, not of such sublime beauty as an helical coral. But chirality it is, and monitored by homeobox genes.

It is hard for me to see a chain of causal connections between chirality on molecular level and chirality of a large scale morphology not even of organism but of a colony of organisms. The water here and specifically on that depth is practically still - the movement of about 1 cm/s or less. "Black corals" belong to so-called soft corals. They don't have calcium carbonate skeletons. Their "housing" is made of hardened mix of minerals and proteins. Coriolis effect doesn't appear on such a small scale. Here I have a story to tell. Six years ago I was in Ecuador and visited the Middle of the World, where they have equator line marked on the ground. The guides there gave a bunch of various presentations including the famous one with a water rotating opposite ways while being flashed. They had a tab with a hole, put it on one side of the equator, poured water from a backet and it rotated clockwise. They then relocated the tab to the other side of the equator, poured water - and it rotated counterclockwise. 'Coriolis,' they said. After the presentation I took one of the guides aside and tell her that I know that Coriolis has nothing to do with this and asked her to tell me the secret. She did. The sense of rotation is determined by which side of the hole they pour water to.

Thank you. Yes it does apply to tartaric acid and a bunch of sugars, including glucose. Google for "stereoisomers of" and whatever compound you're interested in and you'll get the physico-chemical information. As to the relevance in biology, I don't know. I hope some experts can illuminate aspects of it at least. I'm not one. Whether it's an effect due to the currents, it could be for all I know, if eddies tend to form with a particular chirality, which they do. A Coriolis effect, as you suggest, is possible. Maybe @Genady is also a traveller, and can provide more information. I somehow find it hard to believe that the calcium carbonate scheletons of corals could be shaped by local eddies, but let's see what others think. Interestingly enough, I've googled for "chirality and corals" and I've found that some calcium carbonate coral scheletons are affected by chirality: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15066 Corals and chirality seems to be an active field of research, judging by Google Scholar's search results. Most of what I've seen is targeted at a molecular level.

Marks of life can be detected by their wavelengths of light, as the telescope collects spectral data on the planet. I hope that the super telescope James Webb is about to launch into space will be a powerful enough tool to give the final answer.

Is this your question, or do you have a question about physics? I don't see one. I'm not sure what the point of posting code is.

This thread is disappointing. If I've learned anything here, it's a thread about the value of anecdotal experience needs to be created. I'm going to wrap this up just for the sake of not leaving this thread hanging. First, I'll descibe what actually motivated me to post this which was initially avoided because I assumed it too verbose and unecessary . A common experience between me and my peers is that the size of technical books have increased. None of us have had hard evidence for it. It was just a common experience with the books we would read and were interested in. I had an hour to kill before I went to the airport and spent that time browsing a bookstore. While there, I looked through the computer books and noticed the publisher "No Starch" printed a copy of "Cyberjutsu: Cybersecurity for the Modern Ninja" that was smaller than their typical books. The experience of finding small books in math, computer science, and physics seems to be increasing. Some of the books even advertise the fact they're "smaller" in their preface. I doubt listing examples will be helpful... So, I made this thread, wondering why did the types of books I read get big; especially if authors are intentionally trying to publish smaller books. Obviously, all of this is anecdotal. I never tried to assert it was anything more than that. Some of you insisted I need to provide evidence that my premise, that newer technical books are larger than older books, is true. Maybe I should've defined "newer" and "older" so that the context would be clearer. You're pushing back against your imagination. You wanted hard evidence that the size of technical books has increased, I started thinking about how we could practically collect that data. I never said it can't be objectively answered. If you're looking for people that want to make you accept some belief or bias, go to a church or political rally and get off science forums. You would've been more productive if you asked for clarification on miscommunications or details that weren't clear. You've added nothing but distraction to the discussion. I think you have a screw lose. You bring up some important points, but I'm not in the mood to continue this at the moment. With respect to Schaum's and Dover, it's the same on my shelves. In fact, my copy of Naive Set Theory by Paul Halmos shrunk because Dover published a reprint which I bought. How and why do you know this?