IrritableOcelot
@IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org
- Comment on madlad 2 weeks ago:
Oh that would be so fun but my brain can’t math that…
- Comment on The best kind of acknowledgements 2 weeks ago:
Doing a study like this with no funding whatsoever is…suspect at best
- Comment on damn these rocks gay. good for them. good for them 2 weeks ago:
You also can’t mention it to the Dutch, they’ll get way too excited.
- Comment on Checks out to me. 3 weeks ago:
The thing about green photons having too much energy isn’t really true, though it’s commonly talked about. Blue photons are significantly higher-energy than green, and are very well-absorbed. There’s speculation that our sun (being a greenish star) just produces too many green photons, and absorbing so many so fast would be detrimental, but I haven’t seen that definitively proven yet. People are trying, though – there are all sorts of papers about making artificial supplementary antennae to absorb in the green region.
There are a couple proposed reasons to reflect green, which range from information theory arguments about decoupling different parts of the photosynthetic mechanism, to the ‘purple earth’ hypothesis mentioned in another comment, to the ‘green sun’ idea. My point is, the why of green photosynthesis is not a settled matter.
Also, the absorbance of red and blue photons isn’t because red and blue photons have useful energies, specifically. The photons excite electrons in a ‘high energy’ path and a ‘low energy’ path, yes, but the elections excited by these photons don’t directly do chemical work – these exitons are in a quantum-coupled system which is very complicated to understand (I won’t even pretend I understand it fully), and the reduction potentials further down the line are only indirectly (and not proportionally) connected to the energies of the original photons.
Basically, we have studied photosynthesis really intensively for like 50+ years, and in some ways it’s still basically magic. The more we study it, the more information we have, but more often than not that leaves us more confused, because it’s just a crazy system. And I, for one, think that’s pretty damn cool.
Will edit later with sources.
- Comment on figs 1 & 2 3 weeks ago:
Laziness. That figures.
- Comment on lick it: the redux 3 weeks ago:
That is generous on what you can lick…
About half of the green ones would still probably kill you, just…slowly.
- Comment on salmon 3 weeks ago:
Ahhhh it’s a humpy, I stand corrected. Not familiar with them. That’s absolutely wild!
- Comment on salmon 3 weeks ago:
Photoshopped, unfortunately. They change, but not that much.
- Comment on Brb 4 weeks ago:
I’ve tried multiple times to get the song ID to work, but the birdsong has to be so loud in the recording for it to detect it that I rarely get close enough to a bird for it to work. I was sad about that, it seemed so cool. And to be honest, for visual ID, I still prefer a bird book. Maybe it’s just a me thing.
- Comment on new organelle!!!! 4 weeks ago:
Sorry, I can’t figure out how to upload a non-image file.
- Comment on NASA 4 weeks ago:
One might say geocentric…Aristotle was right y’all.
- Comment on NASA 4 weeks ago:
Well, yeah. The earth is a better reference frame, but the orbital velocity of the moon (3679.2 km/h) is no less impressive.
- Comment on life decisions 1 month ago: