Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

A cool thought about cancer expressed at Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane (2006) is that cancer it is the direct product of natural selection gone wrong!

Cancer cells are obviously selected against anti-cancer mechanism, which when they manage to evade, they reproduce uncontrollably, gaining more and more momentum.

Stable isotope.

Highly radioactive isotope of caesium with half-life of 30.17 y. Produced from the nuclear fission of uranium, TODO exact reaction, not found in nature.

The fucked thing about this byproduct is that it is in the same chemical family as sodium, and therefore forms a salt that looks like regular table salt, and dissolves in water and therefore easily enters your body and sticks to things.

Another problem is that its half-life is long enough that it doesn't lose radioactivity very quickly compared to the life of a human person, although it is short enough to make it highly toxic, making it a terrible pollutant when released.

This is why for example in the goiânia accident a girl ended up ingesting Caesium-137 after eating an egg after touching the Caesium with her hands.

Sequence alignment is trying to match a DNA or amino acid sequence, even though the sequences might not be exactly the same, otherwise it would be a straight up string-search algorithm.

This is fundamental in bioinformatics for two reasons:

Mnemonic: in means into. So we are going into a codomain that is large enough so that we can have a different image for every input.

Mnemonic: sur means over. So we are going over the codomain, and covering it entirely.

If you point a light detector to any empty area of the sky, you will still get some light.

The existence of this is quite mind blowing, since "there is nothing there emitting that light".

To make sense of how it is possible to see this light, you can think of the universe as the expanding raisin bread model, but it expands faster than light (thus the existence of the cosmological event horizon), so we are still receiving light form the middle, not the borders.

CMB is basically perfectly black-body radiation at 2.725 48 K, but it has small variations with variations of the order of 200 microKelvin: cosmic microwave background anisotropy.

where:

Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) page 85:so it is quite cool to see that organic chemistry is one of the things that pushed atomic theory forward. Because when you start to observe that isomers has different characteristics, despite identical proportions of atoms, this is really hard to explain without talking about the relative positions of the atoms within molecules!

TODO: is there anything even more precise that points to atoms in stereoisomers besides just the "two isomers with different properties" thing?