- AskScience AMA Series: We are bio-engineers from UCSF and UW who just unveiled the world's first wholly artificial protein for controlling cells, which we hope will one day help patients with brain injury, cancer and more. AUA!
- Is it theoretically possible to surround the sun with solar panels and “harness” the sun?
- How do scientists measure the temperature when trying to get to absolute zero?
- Why are solar sails reflective? Wouldn't the momentum transfer from the photons to the sail better if it were matte?
- How is Accutane made?
- Is rotating black holes' gravitational field perfectly spherical?
- How do we know that red shifted light from distant galaxies is from expansion rather than it being an intrinsic property of light traveling a great distance?
- When a supersonic bullet decelerates below Mach 1 is the path of the bullet disrupted and why?
- Can you have two colds at once?
- How does NASA colorize black and white photos of Hubble?
- How does a shockwave kill you?
- Hubble Telescope has been producing the best space images for decades, and is still going. Is it about to become obsolete or should we make another/better version to spread the workload?
- If an object the size of a piece of paper were placed on the surface of the sun facing earth, obscuring that area, how big of a shadow would it make?
- Can mixed plastics (HDPE, PLA, PP, etc.) be blended together as feedstock and remain cohesive in a product?
- Could Gravitational Time Dilation be a factor as to why we haven't found extraterrestrial life?
- What causes deathly food allergies and how can just merely touching something trigger a fatal reaction?
| Posted: 02 Aug 2019 04:00 AM PDT Hi Reddit! We're the team of researchers behind the world's first fully synthetic protein "switch" that can control living cells. It's called LOCKR, and it's a general building block to create circuits in cells, similar to the electrical circuits that drive basically all modern electronics (Wired called this the "biological equivalent of a PID algorithm", for any ICS people out there). Imagine this: A patient gets a traumatic head injury, causing swelling. Some inflammation is necessary for healing, but too much can cause brain damage. The typical approach today is to administer drugs to control the swelling, but there's no way to know the perfect dose and the drugs often cause inflammation to plummet so low that it impedes healing. With LOCKR (stands for Latching Orthogonal Cage Key pRoteins), you could create "smart" cells programmed to sense inflammation and respond automatically to maintain a desired level - not too high, not too low, but enough to maximize healing without causing permanent damage. BTW, we've made the system freely available to all academics, you can access the blueprints [here]. We're here to talk about protein design, genetic engineering and synthetic biology, from present efforts to future possibilities. We'll be on at 11 AM PT (2 PM ET, 18 UT). Ask us anything! Here are some helpful links if you want more background:
We're a team of researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), the UC Berkeley-UCSF Graduate Program in Bioengineering, and the University of Washington Medicine Institute for Protein Design (IPD). Here's who's answering questions today:
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| Is it theoretically possible to surround the sun with solar panels and “harness” the sun? Posted: 01 Aug 2019 10:14 PM PDT |
| How do scientists measure the temperature when trying to get to absolute zero? Posted: 02 Aug 2019 07:09 AM PDT Wouldn't the act of measuring the temperature produce heat and how do they get accurate enough to measure it to within a billionth of absolute zero? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 02 Aug 2019 04:40 AM PDT Maybe I don't understand momentum properly, but wouldn't the direction of the momentum be better conserved if the photons didn't bounce off the surface? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 02 Aug 2019 06:58 AM PDT |
| Is rotating black holes' gravitational field perfectly spherical? Posted: 02 Aug 2019 06:53 AM PDT I recently read about the ringularity - the black hole, as it's rotating, can't have a singularity, as a single point can't rotate, so it must contain a rotating ring, which contains the mass of the black hole. However, if the above is as I understand it, then can the black holes have a non-spherical gravitational field? If an internal structure of the black hole is a 2D like, ring-shaped object, then the left-right side of the black hole should have a tiny little more mass, hence gravity, then the top-down side of our black hole, which would create a strange, ellipsoid gravitational field. Is the above is possible? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Aug 2019 08:51 PM PDT Could the red shifted light from distant galaxies actually be due to some unknown property of light when it travels great distances rather than from the universe expanding? For example, what if dark matter/energy weakly interact with the photons causing the wavelengths to shift. Perhaps we would never be able to measure this property of light at the comparatively minuscule distances we could achieve in a lab on Earth. [link] [comments]  |
| When a supersonic bullet decelerates below Mach 1 is the path of the bullet disrupted and why? Posted: 01 Aug 2019 02:12 PM PDT |
| Can you have two colds at once? Posted: 01 Aug 2019 08:33 AM PDT |
| How does NASA colorize black and white photos of Hubble? Posted: 01 Aug 2019 10:32 PM PDT Not sure if I should ask this in the Photography subreddit but I'll try here. So I found this video right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDwkDZ5dx-c and the person said there that all images from Hubble are B&W. The way they color the image is by taking three B&W photos and then assigning them a spectrum (RGB). What I want to know is how they assigned it to the spectrum. The person just clicked a button and I don't know how they did that specifically. Lastly, once all the three are assigned a spectrum, how do they blend the three images together? [link] [comments]  |
| How does a shockwave kill you? Posted: 01 Aug 2019 09:16 AM PDT Hi guys, this is a bit of a morbid question but I thought here would be the best place to get an answer. I'm unsure if I'm correct but when an explosion occurs with people in the 'blast radius' I heard main causes of death are from fragmentation and other objects which I can understand. However I have also heard that it's not the flame of the explosion that kills people it can be the shock wave. My quick question is what is the effect on the human body usually from the forces in that shockwave that is usually fatal? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Aug 2019 01:24 PM PDT |
| Posted: 01 Aug 2019 01:56 PM PDT Obviously this is assuming the object doesn't immediately evaporate from the energy of the sun. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Aug 2019 07:22 PM PDT I'm wondering if several different types of plastic could be blended and melted together to form a product that wouldn't fall apart. Or at least be useful in some other way. I'm trying to implement a recycling program, but we can't separate the various types of plastic products/packaging. Any help/ideas would be much appreciated [link] [comments]  |
| Could Gravitational Time Dilation be a factor as to why we haven't found extraterrestrial life? Posted: 01 Aug 2019 06:25 PM PDT Since Gravity essentially "slows time down" and mass (i.e. Earth) warps space and time, could this be why we haven't found extraterrestrial life on other planets? Is it possible that civilization could be rising and falling, rising and falling, rising and falling, at such a "fast" rate relative to us that we aren't even noticing it? Alternatively, could life be assembling at such a "slow" rate relative to us that we aren't even noticing it? Would it mean that in order to find life elsewhere, it would have to be experiencing similar Gravitational Time Dilation relative to Earth? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 01 Aug 2019 06:44 AM PDT There are people with very severe reactions to foods like peanuts or bananas for example who go into anaphylactic shock after just coming in contact with an allergen. They break out into hives, start turning colors, their throat starts closing up, etc. So how does it work? What's going on at the cellular level to cause such a severe chain reaction? Surely there's no evolutionary benefit to dying from touching something that's entirely harmless to the vast majority of the rest of the species, so is it some sort of mutation? And are there other animals that have similar allergies, or is it just humans? [link] [comments]  |
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