Recent submissions

Comment · 1 day ago
This would predict that we should be seeing far more mystery collapses than we do though
Comment · 8 days ago
It's literally happening in a new way, for one. Also, the alternative to reporting this story is not reporting this story, which might lead us to the impression that interference in South American elections had ended.
Comment · 18 days ago
He could be pressuring them to stop striking refineries on behalf of Trump.
Comment · 22 days ago
d doesn't turn right for me, but shift+d does. Arrow keys do work though.
Comment · 26 days ago
Autocorrect might be doing it
Comment · 1 month ago
I think the problem might be that you're looking for a description of reality that's truly fundamental, but that's not the goal of most biologists. The point of a minimal model is to make it easy to reason about a system and efficiently make predictions. It's a practical approach done for the sake of time and money. If it takes me weeks to plan an experiment using a QM model instead of a day with a classical one, and I end up doing the same thing anyway, what's the point?

>Although if I did relax this position, I'd then be in need an explanation for why all of biochemistry feels like it takes place in some kind of cartoon universe. Like, maybe I've failed to put my finger on the reason, but I can't shake the feeling that the world being presented in biology class is just a little too cute to be this one.

Here's one possible explanation for this feeling. Consider the alternative world: any time you write a paper about a protein, you have to measure its interactions with every other biomolecule that's present in the cell of interest. Then, you need to model all of those interactions simultaneously. You probably couldn't do that in 10 lifetimes. It's just not practical to do this, so you never read about it. Papers and textbooks necessarily present things in an overly focused way.

So any paper you read has some...selection bias? If you're trying to find a zinc finger that binds some particular DNA sequence, and you find one and it has nanomolar affinity, you don't need to worry about what happens when that ZF binds actin or RNA polymerase or some phospholipid. We already know from the fact that it has nanomolar affinity for its target DNA that it isn't being sequestered by anything else in any measurable way. But its affinity for actin or whatever isn't zero - there IS a number, and they DO interact - it's just that it's incredibly weak and transient, so you're not going to notice it incidentally. Biology may seem cute because the ugly version would cost 20,000x as much to produce.

Comment · 1 month ago
Your key and lock analogy is simply incorrect. Those interactions can be modeled with classic electrochemistry and are super predictive - the specificity is driven by evolution, not quantum mechanics. I mean sure, every system is technically quantum mechanical but those effects are never explored afaik.

There are even educational demonstrations where people shake bags of 3D printed proteins with magnets (including competing proteins) and you end up with the expected structure.

Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 4 months ago
Local cops/AG persecuting groups they don’t like
Comment · 4 months ago
When you’re deciding which antibodies to buy you’ll look at these figures to get a sense of their quality. Antibodies aren’t perfect and might bind proteins unrelated to the one you want to study. Depending on your application, some off-target binding might be acceptable, but usually it’s not. Also, they might just be completely nonfunctional and bind nothing (perhaps due to missteps during manufacturing).

So what this fraud does is convince you to give these antibodies a chance when you otherwise wouldn’t have. You should validate them yourself and show they only bind your target before doing an experiment, but now you’re just wasting time and money evaluating something that’s guaranteed to fail.

Antibodies are notoriously unreliable, so you might have to give two or three vendors a try before you get one that works. Now I’m starting to wonder how much of that reputation is due to fraud and not just nature.

Comment · 5 months ago
Was there not enough interest from institutional investors?
Comment · 5 months ago
Comment · 5 months ago
There’s nothing to be reminded of. English has a word to describe North and South America together (“the Americas”). Other languages have different words for the same concept.

It’s like reminding someone they shouldn’t say “bicycle” but should instead say “fahrrad”.

Comment · 5 months ago
This could easily be sleep apnea

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton