Robbie Gonzalez's discussions

What do you know... mention left-handed DNA in the morning, and it pops up in the Spider-Man trailer later that afternoon (around 1:30). Read more

You're right, sorry if that wasn't clear. When I say XNA, I'm referring to the "family" of artificial nucleic acids wherein the five carbon deoxyribose sugar group from DNA is swapped out "for any number of artificially produced molecules." Read more

Happy to see you read the post. Read more

You'll enjoy this: [trextrying.tumblr.com] Read more

fixed, cheers! Read more

Fixed, cheers. Read more

Thanks Liz — we just updated the post to reflect AA's announcement. Read more

Touché. Read more

There's a growing body of evidence that suggests TNA (one of the six XNAs examined by Pinheiro's team) may have been a simple, four-carbon-sugar (threose) precursor to RNA. Alasdair did a good writeup on it a couple of months ago (the ASU researcher Alasdair quotes was a co-author on this latest study, as well). Read more

fixed, cheers Read more

You know what this means, right? You'll have to find a way to incorporate one into your dissertation. Read more

You never took a physics lab where you built pinhole cameras? You were robbed. Read more

Correct. Freese and Savage's calculations are based on the assumption "that WIMPs are excellent candidates for the dark matter in the Universe." Read more

Correct. Beatty is referencing the color of the geology itself, not whether it's being bathed with sunlight. Read more

Good one! Read more

shh is a good one, I just didn't think it fell under the umbrella of scifi/fantasy. Read more

The nematodes that carry P. luminescens in their guts make their home in the soil. Soil gets into wounds, soil contains nematodes, nematodes contain luminescent bacteria. Boom, glowing soldiers. Read more

H3 here refers to what the researchers call the height of the "helm," which is basically how far the water droplet pulls down the surface of the oil. Read more

Good point. Different oils have different surface tensions, as well, which is directly related to the "bouyancy" of the water droplets. To clarify: the researchers acquired these results using vegetable oil. Post has been corrected to reflect this. Read more

Nobody had been to the floor of the Mariana Trench in 50 years, but a lot of people have been exploring the ocean deep. Read more