Science 101 (and sometimes 201)

[MSFixR]

One of the researchers on our floor uses the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, in his research.Every few days his technicians must transfer the flies, their eggs and pupae to fresh feeding tubes. Invariably some escape. Three guesses to whose office they eventually come. I try to keep my office free of things that attract the critters such as fruit to no avail. Likewise yeast/sugar water traps do little to capture the little lovelies. I type this missive while swatting at a recent invader of my serenity and a test of my sanity. The fifth circle of hell must be overflowing with these pests. I shall henceforth live a irreproachable life.

Fluit flies doing what fruit flies do best.

P.S. About 75% of known human disease genes have a recognizable match in the genetic code of fruit flies, and 50% of fly protein sequences have mammalian analogues. An online database called Homophila is available to search for human disease gene homologues in flies and vice versa. Drosophila is being used as a genetic model for several human diseases including the neurodegenerative disorders Parkinson's, Huntington's, spinocerebellar ataxia and Alzheimer's disease. The fly is also being used to study mechanisms underlying aging and oxidative stress, immunity, diabetes, and cancer, as well as drug abuse.

[Blackmask]

Are drug abuse fruit flies those that got curious and sampled mushrooms rather than sticking to fruit like they are supposed to?

[Plastic Flute]

Fruit Files: You Rat Bastard Fix
Lechon

[MSFixR]

The guy who uses them is engaged in diabetes research.

[Plastic Flute]

Yes you told me ty ty and I pray for a cure. But Fruit fly Porn? I should report you.
Question. .. Is the reason that caves produce large crystals is that they grow from from heat to cooling conditions?

[MSFixR]

Why is the sky dark at night?

See: Olber's Paradox

[FireBird]

I'm also highly offended by your Fruit Fly porn.

How dare you? It's not even sexy!

[Plastic Flute]

Originally Posted by MSFixR

Why is the sky dark at night?

See: Olber's Paradox

Cause the Sun moved?

[Plastic Flute]

But No. The oldest and simplest astronomical observation tells us something profound about the universe. The sky is dark at night. It isn’t obvious why this should be so. If you stand in a small grove of trees and look toward the horizon, you can see patches of sky in the distance between the tree trunks. But if you stand in a large forest, your view is everywhere blocked by a “solid wall” of tree trunks. Extending the analogy to three dimensions, if the universe of stars is large enough, your line of sight should be blocked in every direction by a “solid wall” of stars. If you could magnify that view sufficiently, the sky would everywhere look something like the image on the left.

The entire sky would be about as bright, and as hot, as the surface of the Sun. The immense distance to the stars making up the “wall of light” would have no effect on the total amount of energy reaching us. We should be surrounded by a blazing oven of light. Instead the night sky is practically black. So where does the argument go wrong?

The German astronomer Johannes Kepler first posed this problem in 1610. He also suggested a solution: the universe of stars, he believed, extends only out to a finite distance; once your line of sight passes that boundary, it encounters only empty space. But how far is that boundary? Why is it there? And what lies beyond it?

Astronomers after Kepler proposed various solutions to the problem of the dark night sky, which came to be called Olbers’ Paradox. In 1823, the German astronomer Heinrich Olbers suggested that starlight is gradually absorbed while traveling through space, and this cuts off the light from any stars beyond a sufficiently great distance. But that doesn’t solve the problem, either. Any absorbing interstellar gas or dust would simply heat up until it reradiated all the starlight it absorbed, and the energy reaching us would be the same. By analogy, sprinkling the air in a hot oven with absorbing dust won’t cool it for very long.

So why is the night sky dark? The first scientifically reasonable answer was given in 1848 by the American poet and writer Edgar Allan Poe! He suggested that the universe is not old enough to fill the sky with light. The universe may be infinite in size, he thought, but there hasn’t been enough time since the universe began for starlight, traveling at the speed of light, to reach us from the farthest reaches of space.

Astronomers have concluded that the universe began some 12 to 15 billion years ago. That means we can only see the part of it that lies within 12 to 15 billion light-years from us. There may be an infinite number of stars beyond that cosmic horizon but we can’t see them because their light has not yet arrived. And the observable part of the universe contains too few stars to fill up the sky with light.

But that is not the whole solution to the paradox. Most stars, like the Sun, shine for a few billion years or so before they consume their nuclear fuel and grow dark. Dying stars spew gas and dust back into space, and this material gives birth to new generations of stars. But after enough generations, all the nuclear fuel in the universe is eventually exhausted, and the formation of luminous stars must come to an end. So even if the universe were infinitely old as well as infinitely large, it would not contain enough fuel to keep the stars shining forever and to fill up all of space with starlight. And so the night sky is dark.

[MSFixR]

Originally Posted by FireBird

I'm also highly offended by your Fruit Fly porn.

How dare you? It's not even sexy!

It is to the fruit fly.

Great answer, Flute. I see you have read today's assignment.

[MSFixR]

In 1971, Intel released the 4004 4-bit central processing unit, the world's first commercially available microprocessor, capable of executing approximately 60,000 instructions per second. We've come a long way since then.

[MSFixR]

A fungus is any member of a large group of eukaryotic organisms that includes microorganisms such as yeasts and molds, as well as the more familiar mushrooms. They are classified as a kingdom that is separate from plants, animals and bacteria. One major difference is that fungal cells have cell walls that contain chitin, unlike the cell walls of plants, which contain cellulose. The discipline of biology devoted to the study of fungi is known as mycology, which is often regarded as a branch of botany, even though genetic studies have shown that fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants. Fungi perform an essential role in the decomposition of organic matter and have fundamental roles in nutrient cycling and exchange. They have long been used as a direct source of food, such as mushrooms and truffles, as a leavening agent for bread, and in fermentation of various food products, such as wine, beer, and soy sauce. Since the 1940s, fungi have been used for the production of antibiotics, and, more recently, various enzymes produced by fungi are used industrially and in detergents. (more...)

[MSFixR]

An electron is a subatomic particle that carries a negative electric charge. It has no known substructure and is believed to be a point particle. An electron has a mass that is approximately 1/1836 that of the proton. The intrinsic angular momentum (spin) of the electron is a half integer value of 1⁄2, which means that it is a fermion. Electrons, which belong to the first generation of the lepton particle family, participate in gravitational, electromagnetic and weak interactions. Electrons have quantum mechanical properties of both a particle and a wave, so they can collide with other particles and be diffracted like light. Since an electron is a fermion, no two electrons can occupy the same quantum state, a property known as the Pauli exclusion principle. The electron was identified as a particle in 1897 by J. J. Thomson and his team of British physicists. In many physical phenomena, such as electricity, magnetism, and thermal conductivity, electrons play an essential role. An electron generates a magnetic field while moving, and it is deflected by external magnetic fields. The exchange or sharing of the electrons between two or more atoms is the main cause of chemical bonding. Electrons may be destroyed through annihilation with positrons, or may be absorbed during nucleosynthesis in stars. Electrons have many applications, including welding, cathode ray tubes, electron microscopes, radiation therapy, lasers and particle accelerators. (more...)