🎓 Dr. Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@qoto.org

Interesting fact of the day: A chimpanzee is about 1.3x to 1.5x stronger than humans when it comes to pulling, jumping, and lifting with the legs in general. However when it comes to physical strength in terms of **pushing** humans are significantly stronger than chimps. Similarly while our legs arent as strong in terms of explosive power (jumping) we are many times better at endurance (using our leg muscles for longer). A human can cover a much farther distance on foot than a chimp could.

So the general factoids about chimps being stronger then us are very misleading. They are simply adapted to be stronger at the sorts of tasks they are suited for and weaker in others, while humans are stronger than a chimp in other ways.

#Science #STEM #Biology #zoology #monkey #chimp #ape #chimpanzee @Science

A friend of mine asked me why DNA and RNA are acids. I am **not** an expert in chemistry but I did study the basics of organic chem and do dabble a bit so I wanted to share the answer here.

Simple answer: Anything that lowers pH is an acid, RNA and DNA lower pH, therefore it is an acid.

Complex answer:

Nucleic Acids are called acids because, well, they lower pH, as anything that is an acid would. pH is, in simplistic terms, the concentration (logarithmicly) of H+ ions in a solution.

A unrelated side note with acids that dont directly donate a H+, your Lewis Acids, they still increase H+ in an aqueous solution because it effects the balance of H+ and OH- dissociation of the water itself. As such the H+ measure is still accurate. However Nucleic acids are not a Lewis Acid, they are a Bronstead-Lowry acid, which means they directly can dissociate and provide the H+ ion directly in an aqueous solution. But I'll get to that.

The individual parts of any molecule can be either acidic and basic, but a molecule overall will usually be one or the other depending on which dominates, RNA is no different, there are three major components to RNA, I attached a picture to show them. The components are a phosphate group, a sugar, and a nitrogenous base (the part that encodes data, your citosine and guanine and shit). Here is the cool part, the word base when talking about the "bases" of a strand is specifically chosen as the the word because they are themselves bases (on their own they would raise pH). Similarly the phosphor group, is also acidic, this should be obvious by its similarity to phosphoric acid. It is a proton donor for the same reason phosphoric acid is a proton donor.

So the only question remaining is why does the acidic phosphor group dominate over the Nitrogenous Base? Well for starters the the phosphate group has a pkA of near 0 , the Nitrogenous Base has a pkB of around 9.8 (depends on the base), so already the phosphate group is going to dissociate more readily than the Nitrogenous Group. However RNA strands are actually far more acidic than the individual Nucleotides that compose them happen to be. The reason for this is that RNA folds back in on itself with the bases associating with each other much like two halves of a DNA strand would. This causes the bases to be on the interior of the molecule while leaving the phosphate groups all around the outside. Since the bases are not exposed to the aqueous solution they do not dissociate as readily as they otherwise would while the phosphate groups are free to dissociate. Thus the RNA exhibits significant acidic properties.

By the way the acidic nature of RNA and DNA is intentional and functionally important. It means that the pH of the solution can be adjusted to effect the charge on the nucleotides and thus move it around. In a neutral pH solution the phosphate groups will have a negative charge. This results in the phosphates pushing each other away. This in turn can cause them to line up on opposite sides with their bases facing each other as well as help to straighten out a strand's backbone.

#DNA #RNA #Chemistry #Organic Chem #OChem #OrganicChemistry #Science #STEM @Science

As a free speech instance this is all to relevant. Science can not exist without it.

"A dictatorship means muzzles all round and consequently stultification. Science can flourish only in an atmosphere of free speech." - Einstein

#FreeSpeech #Einstein #Quote #Science #STEM

Einsteins true genius was in seeing past the accepted truths to a more fundamental nature of the universe than our preconceived notions would allow:

"Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they might come to be stamped as "necessities of thought," "a priori givens," etc. The path of scientific progress is often made impassable for a long time by such errors. Therefore it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analyzing long-held commonplace concepts and showing the circumstances on which their justification and usefulness depend, and how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. Thus their excessive authority will be broken. They will be removed if they cannot be properly legitimated, corrected if their correlation with given things be far too superfluous, or replaced if a new system can be established that we prefer for whatever reason." -- Einstein

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Original:

Begriffe, welche sich bei der Ordnung der Dinge als nützlich erwiesen haben, erlangen über uns leicht eine solche Autorität, dass wir ihres irdischen Ursprungs vergessen und sie als unabänderliche Gegebenheiten hinnehmen. Der Weg des wissenschaftlichen Fortschritts wird durch solche Irrtümer oft für längere Zeit ungangbar gemacht. -- Einstein

#Stem #Science #Einstein #Quotes @Science

Hacked together an ultraportable HF antenna system to work well between 3.5Mhz - 200 MHz (80 meters - 2m) frequencies. Basically took a coil loaded GRA-1899T antenna with telescoping antenna, added some off-the shelf BNC adapters and did some minor hacking. To make it work I had to remove the center connector from two of the BNC adapter s(marked with an X in the diagram). Then added a short-circuit BNC connector, which connects the otherwise floating center connector from the bottom half to ground/shield enabling the counterpoise. Added two additional telescoping elements for the counterpoise and we have a complete system.

The thing I like about the approach is the modularity. For example I can remove or add normal t-connectors to change the number of counterpoises used. The setup pictured uses 2 counterpoises but it would be trivial to setup 1 to 4.

Also the short circuit connector (pictures here as the black and teal connector with the short circuit in it) can allow me to do multiple things if i want to get more complicated. For example if I want to remove the short circuit I can replace it with coils or capacitors for additional tuning. I can also leave it as is but connect an earth ground to it to improve the effectiveness of the counterpoise.

A final note, the loading coil attached to the radiating part of the antenna has a jumper with 6 different positions. This lets you manually adjust the size of the loading coil for different frequencies. Fine tuning is accomplished by changing the length of the antenna itself.

#Science #electronics #RF #radio #Amateur AmateurRadio #HAM #HAMRadio ## @Science

cool article about creating matter from light:

https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=119023
"
#science #physics @Science

I am really digging the back and forth video science debate regarding the chain fountain ElectroBoom and Steve Mould are doing.

This is the 4th video, each of them are 2 videos in at this point.

https://youtu.be/0xr8Vh7z83g

@Science #science #physics

You know you are a nerd when you by a textbook for over a hundred dollars and at twice the price just to get it new and then cant sleep the night before because your excited to get it....

@Science #science #physics #math #maths #mathematics #EE #electronics

Just a reminder, historic climate change predictions modeling human caused global warming has turned out to be surprisingly accurate.

The attached image shows the average of the leading predictions from 2004 and how it tracks to the actual observed climate change. The accuracy turned out to be quite exceptional.

#Science #Climate #ClimateChange #Environment @Science

Just another day on the fediverse...

#science #funny #joke #humor @funny

I cant express how much I love this dudes notebook!

https://interestingengineering.com/this-physics-teacher-makes-art-out-of-formulas

#Science #art #calligraphy #writing #physics @Science

A 104 year old book I just added to my collection. It is still amazingly relevant too in the modern era.

@lucifargundam #book #books #reading #science #engineering #antiques

Sometimes I really really love the techno-jargon in some of the intros of the white papers I write... Here is one I was just reading that I am working on:

******* is a consensus driven, ultra-fast, Cryptocurrency providing Byzantine Fault Tolerance and guaranteeing a Perfect Failure Detector. In other words, Strong Perpetual Accuracy as well as Strong Completeness. It guarantees Strong-consistency and it can also be extended to provide State-machine Replication with all the same guarantees.

#science #cryptocurrency #crypto #ComputerScience

YAY! The Siru.box I ordered just came in. Havent used it yet but its basically a usb controlled and powered power supply. Lets you control the voltage and/or current and even has a very simple API so you can control it programatically. Not sure if/when I will have a use for this but it was cheap enough and cool enough I figured I'd snatch one up.

@Electronics #electronics #EE #science

I must admit, the physics books do get a bit ridiculous :)

@Science @funny #science #funny #physics #humor #joke #meme #math #maths #mathematics

Found this in my notes from a while back. Shows how to calculate the values for a balun to match a transmission line to an antenna.

#Ham #HamRadio #radio #rf #EE #electronics #ElectricalEngineering #Science #math #maths #mathematics @math

:: tens of thousands of people die of covid everyday::

COVID conspiracy theorists: Bah the numbers are made up, they just report anyone who dies for any reason as a covid death. Fake news!

:: one person who already had severe allergies and a heart condition dies from the COVID vaccine::

Also COVID conspiracy theorists: OMG see the vaccine is deadly an more dangerous than the virus, it is a legit threat and has a microchip in it!

#COVID #Vaccine #coronavirus #science #Biology

I have been thinking about writing a webapp that would enable QOTO to become the first "open, distributed, scientific journal".. I am still thinking about how I am going to go about it but the idea would be a scientific journal that anyone, regardless of credentials or pre-approval, can submit articles and peer-review and ultimately the acceptance or rejection of an article will happen without a centralized authority.

In all liklihood acceptance will be "fuzzy" in that it will be up to the reader to decide if the groups which approved of the article through peer review have sufficient credentials that you trust them. So the key will be in designing a way to make that work.

Ideas are welcome of course.

#Science #STEM #PeerReview

Sometimes when im bored ill just doodle out little math proofs to make sure i remember the solutions. I admit, i am a nerd.

Excuse the poor handwriting, I was just scribbling and not really trying to write nice.

#Math #maths #mathematics #NumberTheory #Numbers #Science #STEM @math

There are people so dense out there that they dont even understand this...

@Science #science #sciences