Questions of the Week
Text instructions for AI vision models; Plant's use of urea; Naturally occurring purines; Lab-grown cocoa; Cryoprotectants; Speed of biochemical reactions; Organic compounds in nuclear fusion reactor
In this post
Text instructions for AI vision models
Lab-grown cocoa
Non-toxic cryoprotectants
Speed of biochemical reactions
Krebs’ cycle in space
Organic compounds in nuclear fusion reactors
Plants’ use of urea
Naturally occurring purines
Text instructions for AI vision models
Is it possible to give AI vision models text instructions while training? For instance, could you give them Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks with his detailed notes on light and optics - what makes shadows look more natural in a portrait, how the colours should be more saturated when light falls on them, how black pigment is used to show shadows, that subtle shadows are better than sharp ones, that portraits should not have too much lighting - he recommended painting people at twilight rather than at noon, and more such. There’s likely to be consensus on at least some ideas about what makes art more aesthetic, could you give explicit instructions to the models about these during training? Is this being done already?
Inspiration - Leonardo: The Biography by Walter Isaacson
Lab-grown Cocoa
Cocoa prices reached an all-time high in March/April this year, mostly due to aging trees, drought, and fungal and viral disease affecting the plants. 60% of cocoa in the world comes from 2 countries - Ivory Coast and Ghana - in West Africa. Given that the cocoa economy has been booming for nearly 3 decades, growing cocoa on land is both labor- and water-intensive, and most cocoa is produced by under-compensated small farmers who’re unable to reinvest in the land and better plants, is anyone growing cocoa in the lab?
Food Brewer in Switzerland, California Cultured in the US and Celleste Bio in Israel are working on this cocoa, but I’m unable to determine if any have gotten to commercial production yet. The Finland-based chocolate maker Fazer is also doing related research.
Note: Cocoa price touched $10,000 per ton in April this year - nearly 3 times the highest price in 2023. Now around $6000-7000 per ton.
Getting to non-toxic cryoprotectants
One of the big problems in cryonics - freezing living tissues/organs/bodies for an extended period of time to preserve them and revive later - is the toxicity of the cryoprotectants. Cryoprotectant can be a mixture of one or more chemicals that is applied to the tissue to be preserved, before subject the tissue to low temperature such as by dipping in liquid nitrogen. Current cryoprotectants are toxic in a few ways
can get broken into compounds which are toxic to cells
can disrupt hydration shells around macromolecules
can damage cell membranes
can dissolve lipid molecules, disrupting processes these molecules are involved in
Have we discovered any non-toxic cryoprotectants yet? (even if they’re partial solutions)
Inspiration - Startup Brings New Hope to the Pursuit of Reviving Frozen Bodies (via Marginal Revolution) | Cryoprotectants and their use in the cryopreservation process
Speed of biochemical reactions
"Flux is a form of flow, but with one crucial difference. Water can flow in a river, or traffic down a street. What goes in at one end and what comes out at the other is the same thing – water, or cars. In biochemistry, flux is the flow of things that are transformed along the way."
Are reactions speeds different in different humans, for instance, do athletes have a higher transformation rate (molecules transformed per second) in mitochondria? Is fitness about increasing this transformation rate? If so, surely there is an optimal rate beyond which you’re cycling molecules without doing useful work? Does attention-deficit disorder have anything to do this - biochemical reactions in the neurons occurring at higher than normal rates and resulting in wasteful transformations? Assuming reaction speeds can differ among humans, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where all reactions are sped up in a human, mostly because of how much energy that would take and you would have a human with the entire Shire’s appetite. So perhaps for humans with a ‘higher metabolic rate’, only some of the reactions occur faster than other humans?
Inspiration - Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death by Nick Lane
How will we detect Krebs’ cycle in space, if it happens/or is happening?
Nick Lane writes in Transformer:
The driving force for metabolism is thermodynamics. This is an intimidating term, but in this context only means the chemical need to react (to dissipate energy) in the same way that water needs to flow downhill.
If the Krebs cycle is ordained by thermodynamics, then it should take place spontaneously in some suitably propitious environment, even in the absence of genes. That idea was once dismissed as ‘if pigs could fly’ chemistry, yet revolutionary new work shows that at least some of the cycle can indeed just happen, catalysed by rocks and metals, rather than by proteins encoded by genes.Organic matter has been found in cosmic dust.
Laboratory studies of interplanetary dust particles (IDPs), unmelted micrometeorites (MMs), and cometary particles have revealed that these particles contain a variety of organic compounds, including hydrogenated amorphous carbon, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and aliphatic hydrocarbons.If the Krebs cycle, which is the most ubiquitous and preserved metabolic pathway among organisms, is happening in space, how will we know? The most crucial molecule is water, which also has been found in cosmic dust. Can we observe the Krebs’ cycle, before we find organisms? Will space organisms have cell membranes (assuming there is at least some basic unitary structure like cells on Earth)?
Organic Compounds in Nuclear Fusion reactors
(Related to the above q)
Are there experiments where organic compounds have been allowed to react spontaneously in a cosmic environment (high temperatures, high density of metals and ions, high energy, large number of collisions)?
Isn’t that environment recreated in a nuclear fusion reactor? What would happen if you included some hydrocarbons in fusion reactor fuel?
Inspiration - Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death by Nick Lane, The Star Builders by Arthur Turrell
Plants’ use of urea - what came first?
Emil Fischer talks about uric acid - a molecule produced when purines are broken down in the body.
The oldest member of the group is known by the rather unattractive name of uric acid… To the physician it is famous as the cause of painful afflictions, e.g. gout. It appeals to zoologists as the main excrement of snakes and as the reservematerial of insects. And finally the enlightened farmers knows it to be a valuable constituent of guano.
Plants depend on urea for growth. Did they evolve to use urea because it was available from the organics wastes of animals, or are those evolutionary pathways not related?
Inspiration - Synthesis in the purine and sugar group, Emil Fischer’s Nobel Lecture, 1902
How many naturally occurring purines are known now?
As of 1902, when Emil Fischer delivered his Nobel lecture, 12 purine group members had been discovered naturally and 146 had been synthesised in the lab, mostly using uric acid as the starter. What are the corresponding numbers now, 122 year later?
Inspiration - Synthesis in the purine and sugar group, Emil Fischer’s Nobel Lecture, 1902
I also write a Global Climate News Roundup covering Climate legislation, research and important developments 3 times a week. I built SummaryWithAI.com to generate AI summaries of long PDFs. You can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.
