I think the most interesting thing about this article is that there is a place called "The Republic of Kiribati," and apparently it's somewhere near "Pongo-Pongo."
It is elementary physics that atmospheres with greenhouse gases are generally warmer, because they retain more radiation, by reflecting it back to the planet's surface, than they would have otherwise. You do not need a complex computer model to observe this basic fact. A planet like Venus with a greenouse gas dominated atmosphere is much hotter than it's distance from the Sun explains alone.
Of course there may be subtleties. Perhaps trees convert more CO2 to oxygen when there is an abundance of CO2. However if the atmospheric CO2 content is rising (something very easy to measure), it is adding a positive impulse to the general temperature of the planet. It may take a complicated computer model to determine how this impulse will play out in terms of day to day weather, but a human induced influence on the tendency for the atmosphere to retain heat is probably not a good thing.
Thank you for the info! I did however find some examples (below) of how DNA folding and tangling can affect the transcription process. I vaguely remember reading something a long time ago about single proteins originating from different segments of DNA, but I may have been imagining it. It may not be a strong enough affect to be a barrier to our understanding like you say, but I don't get the idea that DNA tangling is all that well understood. Is this true?
Here are the links along with key excerpts:
"...It has been put forward that many of these chromosomal changes are caused by the ability of certain specific types of DNA sequences to fold into unusual structures which interfere with the faithful copying of chromosomes."
www.cpa.ed.ac.uk/news/research/07/item3.html
"...The knots and kinks in the DNA provide crucial topological stop-and-go signals for the enzymes."
www.khouse.org/articles/technical/19971201143.ht ml
"...our holdup in using this data is actually now what the genes are, and how they interact."
One example of this, is the protein folding problem. A sequence of DNA, which corresponds to a sequence of amino acids in a protein, still leaves the problem of how the string of amino acid molecules folds up to make a 3D structure. This problem is still really really hard.
What makes things harder is that DNA itself folds up and tangles upon itself, meaning that different sections of DNA on completely different ends of the long molecule can contribute to the same protein. It's going to be very difficult to make full use of knowing the sequence of a strand of DNA until problems like these are solved.
I'm not an expert, does anyone out there know of any interesting advances in the protein folding problem?
One useful measure of a quantum computer is how many qubits you can maintain in a quantum mechanical superposition. The problem is called decoherence. The more qubits you try to link together the more likely they are to decohere from their pure quantum mechanical state, and behave more like a macroscopic object, in this case, say a regular old transistor bit.
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I think the most interesting thing about this article is that there is a place
called "The Republic of Kiribati," and apparently it's somewhere near "Pongo-Pongo."
It is elementary physics that atmospheres with greenhouse gases are generally warmer, because they retain more radiation, by reflecting it back to the planet's surface, than they would have otherwise. You do not need a complex computer model to observe this basic fact. A planet like Venus with a greenouse gas dominated atmosphere is much hotter than it's distance from the Sun explains alone.
Of course there may be subtleties. Perhaps trees convert more CO2 to oxygen when there is an abundance of CO2. However if the atmospheric CO2 content is rising (something very easy to measure), it is adding a positive impulse to the general temperature of the planet. It may take a complicated computer model to determine how this impulse will play out in terms of day to day weather, but a human induced influence on the tendency for the atmosphere to retain heat is probably not a good thing.
Thank you for the info! I did however find some examples (below) of how DNA folding and tangling can affect the transcription process. I vaguely remember reading something a long time ago about single proteins originating from different segments of DNA, but I may have been imagining it. It may not be a strong enough affect to be a barrier to our understanding like you say, but I don't get the idea that DNA tangling is all that well understood. Is this true?
t ml
Here are the links along with key excerpts:
"...It has been put forward that many of these chromosomal changes are caused by the ability of certain specific types of DNA sequences to fold into unusual structures which interfere with the faithful copying of chromosomes."
www.cpa.ed.ac.uk/news/research/07/item3.html
"...The knots and kinks in the DNA provide crucial topological stop-and-go signals for the enzymes."
www.khouse.org/articles/technical/19971201143.h
"...our holdup in using this data is actually now what the genes are, and how they interact." One example of this, is the protein folding problem. A sequence of DNA, which corresponds to a sequence of amino acids in a protein, still leaves the problem of how the string of amino acid molecules folds up to make a 3D structure. This problem is still really really hard. What makes things harder is that DNA itself folds up and tangles upon itself, meaning that different sections of DNA on completely different ends of the long molecule can contribute to the same protein. It's going to be very difficult to make full use of knowing the sequence of a strand of DNA until problems like these are solved. I'm not an expert, does anyone out there know of any interesting advances in the protein folding problem?
One useful measure of a quantum computer is how many qubits you can maintain in a quantum mechanical superposition. The problem is called decoherence. The more qubits you try to link together the more likely they are to decohere from their pure quantum mechanical state, and behave more like a macroscopic object, in this case, say a regular old transistor bit.