CharonY

In my own biased opinion, I always assumed that we underestimate animal intelligence. In part, because we cannot help but view it through our own experiences and hence, assume that anything closer to us (in appearance and behaviour) must also be more intelligent. A change is coming in that regard, though: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7555673/ When I did my undergrad, I was highly skeptical of some of the tests (such as the mirror test) as it presumes something about the animal (e.g. that the visual cue has any relevance to them). Moreover, typically only few animals are used in behavioural studies. If we were to study human behaviour, we would not (or at least should not) overinterpret the outcome. Yet, in animal studies folks often assume that there is less individual difference. I think most pet owners know that there is a lot of individual differences and only fairly recently studies have started to push to a change in the perspective of animal behaviour analysis.

No worries, I don't disagree. But expertise (at least in science) tends to coalesce around some kind of firm consensus, surrounded by wobblier, but still fairly bits and then areas where experts should state that things are speculative. I do know (especially with recent experience) that this is not always the case and some folks really are loud outside their field. So in that regard I understand that folks can be uncertain regarding who they should believe. However, that there is more recent trend to ignore consensus and expertise altogether and treat even the most ridiculous things as equivalent to even minimal levels of expertise. We went from opinions with insufficient data/understanding straight to 5G aliens did it. And that part worries me, as it essentially renders facts entirely non-relevant.

Worse than that. Somehow managed to delete the negation, too. Fixed now.

This great man phenomenon is unfortunately ubiquitous and is probably amplified with the celebrity thingy. Folks for some reason feel that they know a person if they seem the often enough and trust what is being said. Interestingly the exact opposite but also somehow convergent effect is happening within online communities. Despite not being seen, the mere repetition of factoids, can make them true and trusted facts. Both are part of the demise of expertise.

I think it is fair to say that not many scientists are very aware of changes outside their specific fields. I think the point still stands that folks are bad at overall risk assessment (for good reasons, but still). We are more willing to invest and change our behaviour to address rare but scary events rather than address other risks which we feel safe about, without good reason.

In developed countries electricity and the transport make biggest bulk of greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture in Canada, for example makes up around 8% of all greenhouse gas emissions (mostly in forms of methane, associated with meat production, I believe). Conversely, transport and energy is about is about 50%. For transportation I do not have more detailed values at hand, but an average the estimate is about 60% for personal transportation. I don't know how much food Canada sends out in help, but I doubt the associated GHG emissions are going to make much of a blip.

It is also part of psychology that roughly falls into the framework of evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately any studies there suffer from reproducibility, coupled with theoretical overreach. I.e., a system where far-ranging hypotheses and even theories are propped up by insufficient data. It does not mean that the theories are wrong per se, but the studies that are supposed to support them are too limited to actually achieve that. The study in question has multiple issues right off the bat. The menstrual cycle and fertility is based on fairly rough estimates (no blood tests, for example), and while the authors acknowledge some perimenstrual issues (e.g. cramps, nausea, irritability, thermoregulation and so on) they kind of waved it off by assuming that they are only happening in the luteal phase. What more recent has shown is that focusing only on the fertility aspect creates blinders for the wide range of hormonal changes which affect overall physiology in an array of ways. Mood changes are likely caused by relative fluctuations of steroids throughout the menstrual cycle, which in turn affect the ability or interest in individuals to draw out money from their customers.

Posted in wrong forum, please disregard.

Technology basically facilitates tendencies and the issue is that especially younger folks are used to the instant gratification offered by things like technology (essentially everyone is carrying a dopamine machine with them at all times). I think we are a bit late in the game for that. The next generation of teachers are already not used to that anymore. In addition, the commodification of education and the increasing view of students as clients is starting to erode education in university as well. Educators in many systems across the world are struggling now to instill critical thinking skills and while it was already deteriorating over last decades, the COVID-19 pandemic has created a bit of a jump which makes things just way more visible otherwise. The reality is that we don't need an oppressive government or system to achieve those goals. That was very much a post WWII type of thinking. Now we have methods to do it voluntarily to ourselves, driven by capitalism, rather than political ideologies.

There are some attempts in that direction, mostly targeted at toxic VOCs. From what I recall, it seems that likely microbes are responsible for oxidizing some of the VOCs and breaking them down . But I don't think that algae were shown to do that. Conversely, I vaguely remember that some algae actually release VOCs (though I cannot recall whether those were in any form harmful). The provided link paints a very poor picture of the capabilities of the company, considering they are conflating CO2 capture with capture of harmful substances (via photosynthesis, no less). Failing that much at basic biochemistry does not inspire confidence. The blurb also seem to suggest that this is just an exhibit, likely putting some algae (or even just a green liquid) into a stand. A real bioreactor for cyanobacteria or algae needs quite a bit more to work. And randomly growing cyanobacteria can also produce toxic microcystins. So there is also that. From what I remember the carbon yield (for fuel or plastic production) was also rather low. I am also skeptical that oxygen production from those volumes would be significant, but I may be wrong.

I believe the iron clusters got oxidized and destabilized under oxygen. CO is also an inhibitor and it actually binds to nitrogenases like haemoglobin, IIRC. As a side note, oxidizing and often destabilizing iron cores is one of the ways many organisms sense oxygen and quite a few regulatory factors related to oxidative stress (and also iron metabolism) are using that. Well, you could have started them! I am just sitting here, looking at physics threads and pretend to understand what swansont is explaining.

One recent worrying finding is that a cat was found to be infected, likely due to consumption of contaminated raw milk. I.e. the virus might get better at jumping from mammal to mammal, which obviously is really bad news for us (humans). https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/30/7/24-0508_article

Among those, Fe plays an outsized role for tons of redox reactions. But some of the rarer ones (including Mo and Va) have been utilized in rather critical enzymes and have not been replaced by more common metals, which in itself is interesting. If you are interested, there are whole fields on metalloenzymes, with recent approaches how various moieties in these large enzyme complexes might move during the various electron transfer processes. Not entirely my world, but it pops up frequently (and sometimes you get to work with folks on things like these). And also the work with them is annoying, just getting your media and glass ware free of metals is a nightmare.

You keep forgetting photosynthetic and other autotrophic organisms that are not plants.

There is another hint: nitrogenase are sensitive to oxygen so they do not work well if too much oxygen is present. From what I remember, nitrogen is thought to be limiting during evolution of early life and the ability to fix nitrogen would have been a massive benefit. Nitrogenases and their cofactors (especially FeMoCo) have a massive body of lit (and I dabbled a bit with it as a grad student) so there is a lot to read on this topic :).

I may be wrong but I think the general assumption is that it is the most likely nitrogen source used by early life.

Oh I see. Chances are that this around the time we started to have hypotheses how respiration actually works. Could be fun to see how folks imagined things to work and compare to what we know now.

I get that- but being a biologist rather than chemist I understand things better if I view it from a mechanistic perspective. It just helps to explain functions better and avoids confusion for reactions that might chemically look similar, but functionally are very different (as in this case). Yes, I know. His research output was low which got him in trouble regarding his teaching position. But his books were so popular, that it hardly mattered. What I meant is that in his most active years, substrate-level phosphorylation was still the basic assumption. So would be curious how much was out in lit, when he wrote the story.

I am not a chemist, so I have no idea if and how that would affect thermodynamics. It would be interesting to see when he proposed that- the idea that cells might be using chemiosmotic gradients was only proposed in the 60s or so. And it took a while longer until folks realized what bag of tricks bacteria had in that regard.

That would be very difficult. Oxygen is used as terminal electron acceptor as it is positioned favourably in terms of reduction potential and can couple with a wide range of donors. Conversely, hydrogen is pretty much on the other end, making it a good donor, but an extremely poor acceptor.

Similarly, a series of studies (ranging from PISA to smaller cohorts) suggest that folks not only read less, but the ability to read long texts (which would include books) is declining, too. Some have pointed towards the incompatibility of cell phones with perusing long texts. Anecdotally, we are also seeing a massive decline in the use of textbooks (including open source electronic text books) over the years. I am not sure what OP tries to say, as it looks fairly incoherent to me, but coupling less active reading and algorithmic pushing of short snippets of factoids (and misinformation) seems to me a much easier pathway to zombification. Also the risk of better AI in my mind is that we offload more boring stuff to them. However, doing boring stuff is part of practice and offloading too much could result in skill degradation. We can see it in class (but likely also on this forum) that being able to copy/paste arguments from somewhere does not translate to actually understanding and able to discuss these arguments.

Not quite. The net reaction of photosynthesis are two separate reactions which are not really mechanistically coupled. Specifically, it initiates an electron transfer chain (functionally similar to respiration) in order to pump protons which then chemoosmotically generate ATP. Water functions as electron donor during the water splitting event. I do think that the chemical notation masks a little bit the underlying biology, especially as carbon fixation in some bacteria happens without light, but that is neither here nor there). I probably should add that glycolysis happens in the cytosol, and the pyruvate is then delivered to hydrogenosomes. The reaction in hydrogenosomes is simpler and ATP formation is by substrate level phosphorylation, as mentioned before. Hydrogen is basically formed to re-oxidize ferredoxin, which is needed for the decarboxylation reaction from pyruvate to acetyl-CoA. Not entirely sure if I get it right but it should be something like: Pyruvate + 2 [H+] + Ferredoxin(ox) -> Acetate + H2 + Ferredoxin(red) + CO2 One way to think about this is that respiration (aerobic or anaerobic) is basically using a redox potential to energy generation, rather thinking that a particular compound being fuel or waste. Basically, if you have a nice electron donor and acceptor pair that generate a nice potential, you can use that potential by using to drive an electron transport chain, that also pumps protons out of the cell to generate a proton gradient that is then used to generate ATP. This means that depending on which pair the cell uses, the same compound can be used as donor or acceptor. Hydrogen is used by many bacteria as electron donor but is also released often in fermentation processes (or the reaction above) to essentially balance the redox budget of the cell (and as you can imagine, released hydrogen can be used by other bacteria, creating interesting cycles within bacterial communities).

A few things from above, the Krebs cycle does not provide energy, one of its functions is to generate reducing equivalents. Likewise, the cycle also does not consume or require oxygen. In aerobic organism oxygen is used as terminal electron acceptor. By coupling this redox reaction to an electron transport chain, proton pumps are are used to create a proton gradient, and that is ultimately used to generate energy (via an ATP synthetase). Anaerobic bacteria use alternative electron acceptors, to do pretty much the same. As others have noted, this is not what is happening here. While glycolysis can happen and generate energy, the interesting bit about hydrogenosomes is another process, which is highlighted in the posted figure. ATP is generated via a multi-step process, which looks like a reversal of acetate activation (which then would go into TCA), but requires ferredoxin shuttle at which H2 is formed.

I don't think that information access will be the issue of the future. It is the declining ability of folks to use it.

There have been numerous surveys among natural scientists back in the 90s and 2000s, when teaching evolution was heavily attacked by the conservative establishment in the US. The overall trend was overall lower religiosity when compared to the average population, but also interesting trends depending on discipline. IIRC the questions were more general, like "do you consider yourself religious" rather than asking things specific to a system (e.g. god or gods). I believe biologists had the lowest number of religious folks whereas, mathematicians and medical folks had higher. I am sure they must still be available somewhere.