RE: Science Porn
May 11, 2015 at 5:45 am
(This post was last modified: May 11, 2015 at 6:22 am by Alex K.)
(May 10, 2015 at 7:11 pm)Chuck Wrote: But keep in mind the surface brightness of milky does not change no matter what distance you look at it from.
I think you want to say that the surface brightness goes down as the object approaches?
Sorry, forget what I just said. It stays the same
Which is quite a mind-boggling fact if one isn't used to thinking about these things.
Inspired by a mother's day post on Jerry Coyne's blog and comments therein, I stumbled across a question I've never really asked myself - if the mitochondria which we get from our mothers, and which do all that important work in our cells, are endosymbionts, i.e. were once independent organisms which got incorporated by other cells to make eucaryotic cells, what are their closest surviving "free-living" relatives? It turns out that it is probably the Rickettsia, some of which produce quite nasty diseases:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artf...e-thought/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickettsia
Now the Rickettsia in the strictest sense don't really live freely - they are still autonomous bacteria, but they need a host cell as an environment to survive. You can see how they could be related to mitochondria. The closest really free relatives are probably also found in the same order
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickettsiales
because some members of this order are still freely living bacteria.
This is maybe not aaaaaah! ooooooooh! level science porn, but I thought that was very fascinating. Maybe 80s science soft porn.
The fool hath said in his heart, There is a God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.
Psalm 14, KJV revised edition