Environmental News

Leaders of scientific societies sent a letter to Mr. Trump

 

Another letter to Trump. Perhaps others exist or are being crafted.

 

They both advise that national competitiveness is rooted in innovation. Itself rooted in education and science funding.

 

America was no doubt made great by industrializing and setting externalities aside. Appeals to that past are understandable. Even as they ignore all the profits later made by American companies more recently selling environmental technologies across the world.

The peculiar contradiction here comes from hating new economies (as in Asia) for setting externalities aside, and for wanting to be like them. As we were before EPA, NAQWA, NAAQS, etc.

Unfettering industries from onerous regulations sounds good, until one considers real regulatory purpose (improving public health thus reducing medical expenditures), and indirect results flowing from regulations.

Those in favor of unfettering industries also speak against 'other-world' dirty economies; here lies cognitive dissonance.

American greatness lies where? In the past or future?

 

I like the idea of counting time by human generations. Actually have a pretentious, unposted post about that

We should approach bacterial evolution analogies cautiously. Those dudes exchange DNA party style. Very different from the staid '1+1=new' approach.

 

Seems you refer to expression of DNA. It is not a sure thing. Which brings us to epigenetics, which brings us to we really don't understand how external selective pressures act on (populations) of genomes. We thought we did. But mysteries have multiplied. During the most recent generation

I know there is some risk in admitting that evolution is not understood. Sorry.

Mostly separate from that, and closer to your first point @68. Whether evolution (in any sense) can lead to 'ethics' (and in what form) is debated by both philosophers and biologists. Which is a recipe for obfuscation if every I heard. The whole thing is pretty much VFR flight not recommended

 

Small populations face the obvious challenge of many fewer potential genome mixers. Perhaps less obvious, that the entire population faces similar environments with similar variations through time. This does not only refer to things like temperature and moisture. Also to predation pressure, disease and parasites, symbionts, pollinators, and other things we might invoke.

Small populations (in traditional genetic thinking at least) get nudged towards a relatively narrow set of 'solutions' and then - bang - something goes out of spec in their environment.

Due to incompleteness of fossil record, small populations (where a bunch of interesting evolution supposedly happens) are unlikely to present themselves for future study. Could probably come up with further dreary outlooks if I set my mind to it.

 

More cheerfully, one might read about a novel way to make vaccines

Virus engineered to rely on artificial amino acids, used as vaccine | Ars Technica

I recommend much of John Timmer's science writing. Probably appropriately he does not try to hard to school readers on what amino acids are. Won't stop me though

Amino acid - Wikipedia

Biological uses of 'non-standard' amino acids is fascinating. I mentioned elsewhere that a wrong AA optical isomer makes a membrane ion channel operate in the opposite way. That really blew me away.

 

"well recycled" You betcha, other outcomes are rare and site (or event) dependent. I did (or should have) provided a link to nice study on maximum known persistence of environmental DNA.

Most of 'dem bones' have undergone complete silicate replacement* and so they are basically 3D photographs of bones, not the real article.

*yet another thing I don't understand

 

Bio one website does not say what they contain. So, no.

I guess it's nutrients (other than carbon) and perhaps bacteria that feed extensively on lipids. A bit further downstream, excess nutrients could increase root growth into drain pipes. But I'm really just rattling about.