TerpenesByMS

TerpenesByMS t1_isyw0v5 wrote

Reply to Assuming we had the technology, would any of you all be willing to go and live permanently on a habitable exoplanet or a terraformed planet? by Golfer345

Based on all those edits, hell yes. Are you selling tickets? I'm a jack of all trades, I can learn to fix anything with only the paltry supplies we brought with us!

I don't care if it's 10 people, 100, 1000, a million. Anybody who says "hell yes" reflexively is my kind of people.

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TerpenesByMS t1_irpxhba wrote

Reply to How evolution get rid of unnecessary stuff? by CoolAppz

Nifty enough for inheritance, it is much easier to turn a trait off than to acquire it in the first place. This makes it easier & faster for vestigial traits to wither or disappear if there is a substantial advantage to be had by losing it - compared to developing whole new adaptations - in terms of number of generations. Evolution is lazy, path of least resistance usually wins.

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TerpenesByMS t1_irap0l9 wrote

Reply to is it possible to synthesize proteins chemically? by yeeturking

In short, yes, but not all proteins are equal here. Longer ones are harder to make.

There are techniques for immobilized substrate synthesis. Basically you glue you starting amino acids to a surface, and you wash your next amino acid reaction blend over to attach the first one. Rinse and repeat for your growing peptide.

This is great for smaller peptides, but massive biopeptides become another beast. G-mod yeast is another great tool as its a cheap way to make abunch of a target protein or enzyme. This is awesome if the enzyme you want already exists in nature.

But fully synthetic peptides? Especially enzymes? Very very very tricky. Some of the most powerful computational chemistry goes toward predicting how proteins will fold, and folding into the right shape is crucial. Fold into the wrong shape and you get Mad Cow Disease, for example, or most often just a dud.

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TerpenesByMS t1_iqwfd62 wrote

Reply to comment by Meatrition in Differences in public and producer attitudes toward animal welfare in the red meat industries -- The results indicate a polarization between the public and livestock producers in their attitudes toward animal welfare, knowledge of husbandry practices and trust in livestock people. by Meatrition

So this study is claiming basically that:

  1. General public have worse opinions of meat industry than people in the meat industry

  2. This means unfair regulations get in the way of business? Unclear.

  3. People in the meat industry believe they are being nicer to meat animals than the general public.

For #3, did the researchers measure how many justifying beliefs people in the meat industry had for continuing to slaughter animals? Bandwagon effect is a big deal, and people will explain why their bad actions were OK a bunch of different ways as long as others are still doing it. Some famous psychology experiments showed us this.

Without turning over the stone of why these survey results come out this way, we are painting an incomplete picture and presenting it as complete, eh Meatrition?

Look, I get the point about how Temple Grandin, etc., had a positive impact on animal welfare in the meat industry. Sorta like gas chambers were an improvement over ovens for the slaughtered during the Holocaust. Pardon the visceral analogy, everyone. This whole line of reasoning about meat workers being kind to animals that are raised for slaughter is one of the most striking examples of mass denial in human history.

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