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| bio | website | |
|---|---|---|
| location | Cambridge, United Kingdom | |
| age | 28 | |
| visits | member for | 1 year, 5 months |
| seen | May 9 at 13:53 | |
| stats | profile views | 62 |
I’m a bioinformatics PhD student at EMBL-EBI and the University of Cambridge but I’m originally from Berlin.
My thesis project is about the regulation of tRNA expression in mammals.
Here’s my …
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Feb 7 |
revised |
How many times did life emerge from the ocean? Adapted the title as suggested in answer |
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Feb 6 |
awarded | Critic |
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Feb 6 |
comment |
Is it the case that all changes in phenotype during life are not inheritable? –1, the paper didn’t actually provide evidence of epigenetic inheritance in any meaningful sense of the word, as is the more general conclusion: so far as we know, there is no single naturally occurring case of passing on of acquired traits. This isn’t unthinkable (see Prader-Willi syndrome), but remains yet to be demonstrated. I’ve written my take on the subject on Skeptics.SE: skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/7338/82 |
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Feb 6 |
awarded | Student |
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Feb 6 |
asked | How many times did life emerge from the ocean? |
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Feb 6 |
comment |
Why is polyploidy lethal for some organisms while for others is not? Excellent question! A topic of active research and without clear consensus, as far as I remember from some talk. |
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Jan 31 |
comment |
Are there any examples of sudden leaps in evolution? Even under punctuated equilibrium, acquisition of new traits happens over a period of thousands of generations, not “just a few generations”. It is punctuated on the geological timescale only. |
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Jan 31 |
comment |
Are there any examples of sudden leaps in evolution? This is selective sweep (i.e. a given allele’s abundance is sweeping through a population via selection). But that isn’t in itself a sudden leap in evolution since the allele is already in existence (= “has already evolved”). |
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Jan 31 |
comment |
How does the brain's energy consumption depend on mental activity? This sounds wishy-washy. In fact, we do have a pretty solid understanding of “how information is processed and how it's constrained by physical laws and principles of entropy and energy.” We might lack the computational power to build good predictive models but the physical, chemical and molecular biological basis is well understood. The whole “we don’t understand the brain” discussion is really a red herring. We do. It’s just that the brain models a very complex network with certain emergent properties, remodelling of which is extremely expensive. |
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Jan 10 |
comment |
Is there any convincing evidence for the existence of nanobacteria? It would be very illustrative if you could post the actual figures shown in these papers. |
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Jan 5 |
comment |
What is the modern state of the theory of evolution? Wow, you were told complete BS. :-( |
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Jan 4 |
comment |
Could Junk DNA be used as a Turing Machine by nature? The problem is not that the proof is specious, it’s that the proof is impossible since the assertion is provably wrong. I agree with the more specific point that cells in particular are Turing complete – but not all self-replicating information machines are. |
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Jan 3 |
comment |
Could Junk DNA be used as a Turing Machine by nature? Unfortunately, it can be shown trivially that self-replication isn’t sufficient for being Turing complete (imagine the programming language “Rep” which has a single command, “rep”, which prints “rep”; clearly this language allows to write self-replicating programs and clearly it isn’t Turing complete). |
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Jan 3 |
awarded | Teacher |
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Jan 3 |
answered | What does the human body use oxygen for besides the final electron acceptor in the electron transport chain? |
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Dec 31 |
comment |
What is the most difficult feature to explain evolutionarily? Fair enough, point taken. |
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Dec 31 |
comment |
What is the most difficult feature to explain evolutionarily? I agree with (2) simply because it’s very hard to find good evidence (as you mentioned with the “just so” stories). I disagree with (1) since this can be explained by quite easy models and is a classical example of evolutionary arms race. |
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Dec 30 |
comment |
Where can I find the common names for the zoology taxonomy? That list is called Wikipedia. ;-) … Seriously, (almost?) all Wikipedia articles on animals carry both the common and the scientific name. |
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Dec 30 |
comment |
Why did the process of sleep evolve in many animals? What is its evolutionary advantage? @Innab It’s irrelevant that the energy expense is only a fraction. The important thing is that there is any at all. Do the math, it will never be beneficial to rest instead spending the same time hunting, because the net energy balance of hunting is positive (i.e. energy take-in rather than expense), so in sum, resting will always spend more energy than hunting. |
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Dec 29 |
awarded | Commentator |
