Viewing profile — xerula

The article explains X-inactivation, and it doesn't play the role you think here: both copies are broadly equally expressed among retinal cells. Also even if all cells in a retina …

Hopefully one thing this work will lead to is more physically accurate iridescence shaders for 3D render engines. The ones I've seen so far only attempt to fake iridescence at an a…

There's a whole world of fine and unusual teas to discover and enjoy. When I fast, I want a tea that provides more meaty aromas and a more complex taste experience – a food substit…

Perhaps it's to do with the fact that these particular bamboo species are monocarpic, i.e. in one life-cycle they set seed just once and then die. So the timing of this event is mo…

Total forest cover is a crude statistic. Primary forests in Asia, where the majority of biodiversity resides, continue to be felled at alarming rates.

Apart from the Romanesque cauliflower, these images mostly just show examples of phyllotactic spirals, which are not really fractals. Fractal models can generate patterns reminisce…

Better information on the actual site: http://www.coelux.com/

It still seems like a problem to me, if your subject (and potentially background) are moving around a lot. I shoot a lot of macro shots of bugs that are always about to jump off pl…

You lack imagination about all the different things that can be done with uniformly black, straight, fine hair. Length is not the only variable, and there is still a huge range of …

Simplistic. There's not enough land/resources on the planet to sustain everyone living a first world lifestyle at our current rates of energy consumption and waste production.

I would say it depends on precisely what scientific work you need to do. E.g. for phylogenetic statistics there are some nice R packages that bundle simulation techniques and measu…

Also "=" is compulsory for setting some named function arguments that have a default value. E.g. format(pi, digits Also you can do things like this when you're bored: ((a c) + 1 ->…

When our great deposits of fossil fuels were being laid down in the Carboniferous, efficient decomposers / recyclers of dead wood and plant material (chiefly higher basidiomycete f…

Also arts and crafts, personalized poetry and short stories, foodstuffs, homemade clothing...

I've withdrawn from mtgox to a UK account via SEPA many times. It's never taken less than two weeks, and last time (about four months ago), it took nearly five weeks. Communication…

He had probably previously encountered Cantor's diagonalization technique for proving the uncountability of the reals. He just saw how to apply the same technique to the question o…

No, arbitrarily large gaps between prime numbers exist. But there are no efficient methods for locating gaps of a particular length. The largest gap for which the end primes are kn…

This is about recent work on a longstanding and famous open question in number theory, called the 'twin prime conjecture'. The conjecture states: there are infinitely many pairs of…

Here is recent (and much more impressive, to me) footage of a direct hit. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LobCDYO78Us

I would say that your worldview is extremely spiritually deficient, if you do not consider that musicians and composers can achieve greatness. Music at its best is extraordinarily …

In absolute life-or-death situations, yes. But as soon as we move even a tiny bit past that point, history shows we seek universally recognized, convenient mediums of exchange. And…

Yes. In related news, Transferwise just banned transfers to bitcoin exchanges.

The universe presents overwhelmingly as a vast void. Of the total space in the universe, what fraction at most do you think is occupied by self-aware minds? What is the maximum per…

Our yardstick is pretty good. We have characterized a vast range of the objects we share out universe with in immense structural detail, from lifeforms here on earth to astronomica…

On the temporal / spatial scale of the universe we are virtually non-existent. On a scale that ranks everything in the universe according to physical / informational complexity & o…