• TWeaK@lemmy.todayEnglish
    661·
    8 天前

    Hey if it works in nature.

    The winglets on the end of airplane wings were added after watching hawk wing feathers with slow motion cameras.

    • nymnympseudonym@piefed.socialEnglish
      30·
      8 天前

      One mark of a truly visionary designer is their ability to see in Nature what others did not, and turn it to human advantage

      image

  • Aniki@feddit.orgOPEnglish
    25·
    8 天前

    yeah i just realized, this isn’t even accurate. we can’t leech off another’s metabolism. there’s no one out there (within reach) .

      • Aniki@feddit.orgOPEnglish
        5·
        8 天前

        actually, what if viruses (free-swimming RNA) were the original form of life and proteins only developed later? then viruses would be the simplest possible organisms.

        • TheGoldenGod@lemmy.worldEnglish
          16·
          8 天前

          That idea resembles the RNA world hypothesis, which proposes that early life may have consisted of self-replicating RNA molecules before DNA and proteins became dominant. RNA is remarkable because it can both store genetic information and catalyze some chemical reactions.

          The difficulty is with calling viruses the original life…

          Modern viruses are not just “free-swimming RNA.” They depend completely on living cells to reproduce. Even the simplest RNA viruses require a host cell’s ribosomes, enzymes, energy, and raw materials. Outside a cell, a virus is essentially inert. That makes it hard to imagine viruses existing before cells did.

          • Aniki@feddit.orgOPEnglish
            4·
            8 天前

            yeah i know about the RNA world hypothesis.

            by the way, has anyone ever built an artificial organism that only uses RNA with no proteins that is actually able to live (reproduce) in an inorganic environment?

    • espurr@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      111·
      8 天前

      maybe we lose the ability to be profound and honest as we age into becoming productive employees

      • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
        71·
        7 天前

        > profound

        > “Wow, this lunar lander and this bacteriophage sure look vaguely alike. Also, have you seen how one is a sphere and we’ve built spherical probes before? And another is a cylinder and we have cylindrical rockets? Wow, fucking crazy, man. Humans are viruses; I’m soooo deep.”

  • Rose@slrpnk.netEnglish
    12·
    8 天前

    Witches and mysticists say “as above, so below”.

    So, according to this pic, in practical reality, it’s actually “as in tiny, so in big”