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GIRONA CATHEDRAL. “The cathedral's interior includes the widest Gothic nave in the world, with a width of 23 metres (75 ft), and the second-widest of any church after that of St. Peter's Basilica (for comparison, the width of the nave of Reims Cathedral is 14.65 m, Saint-Étienne de Sens, 15.25 m and 12 m, in Notre Dame de Paris).” https://lnkd.in/gvmpNwbx View in LinkedIn

WHEN [MATTER] = [ANTIMATTER]. “At such times, close to the Planck time after or before zero, there should be an equal probability of finding any particle or antiparticle on either side of the Big Bang in time.” https://lnkd.in/gDaxUYAS View in LinkedIn

QUANTUM INFORMATION. “With his aphorism ‘it from bit’, Wheeler argued that anything physical, any it, ultimately derives its very existence entirely from discrete detector-elicited information-theoretic answers to yes or no quantum binary choices: bits. In this spirit, many theorists now give ontological primacy to information.” (Julian Barbour). https://lnkd.in/gVen_Bc8 View in LinkedIn

Wet limestone cobblestone street leading to the great wall in Girona. View in LinkedIn

KNOCK-OUTS. “Later, parallel mutations in the adenine DNA glycosylase gene (mutY) arose in independent lineages; these mutations approximately halved the mutation rate, apparently by knocking out a mechanism by which misincorporations of oxidized nucleotides during DNA replication (caused by the original mutT defect) were misrepaired. The resulting reduction in genetic load was estimated to be ~0.5%.” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

ALL IS CHANGE. “Solid land has been converted into sea. Sea has been changed into land. Marine shells lie far distant from the deep, and the anchor has been found on the summit of the hills.” (Page 13, Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, Volume 1, By Sir Charles Lyell, Gérard Paul Deshayes). https://lnkd.in/dZDsbmvJ View in LinkedIn

HITCHHIKING MUTATIONS. “Indeed, both mutation-rate scenarios have been observed in an E. coli population in the LTEE. After thousands of generations, a mutation in the nucleoside triphosphate pyrophosphohydrolase gene (mutT) that caused a ~150-fold increase in mutation rates spread through the population, presumably by hitchhiking with one or more beneficial mutations.” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

RISKY STRATEGY. “In the long term, increased mutation rates are not without evolutionary risk. Opportunities for mutations that greatly improve fitness will eventually run out in the optimization regime. It may then be beneficial to compensate for a hypermutator defect and to become less evolvable in order to lower the genetic load.” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

POSITIVE IMPACT. “However, the hypermutator subpopulation has increased evolvability because it has a much higher per-capita chance of producing the next highly beneficial mutation, or multiple beneficial mutations, than a non-mutator competitor (Fig. 3a). Thus, despite their slight fitness costs, hypermutators can sometimes hitchhike to fixation with the beneficial mutations that they generate.” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

FREQUENCY. “Given the balance between their high rate of occurrence and small fitness costs, hypermutators might exist at frequencies of 10(-6) -10(-4) in experimental populations of E. coli.” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn