Scientists found a 'leak' in photosynthesis that could be tapped into energy
cnet.com
cnet.com
1. Rickettsia Bacteria have an ATP transporter! If we engineer E. Coli with this transporter, we can feed bioreactors with pure ATP and get even more efficiency! (Turns out this is not a real bottleneck in bioreactors, and you’ll likely waste more money synthesizing ATP anyway)
2. Glucose is transported in intestines via a glucose-sodium antiporter protein. Maybe we can find a drug that blocks this and you can eat as much sugar as you want! (Turns out you’ll have uncontrolled diarrhea if you do).
This idea sounds as boneheaded as these ideas. If there’s a “leak”, you bet your ass it’s there for a reason.
Uncontrolled diarrhea for how long?
I'd pay for a pill that would do similar to what you describe but for pizza instead of sugar if the uncontrolled diarrhea was only for a few hours.
Sounds like a perfect product for a prank supply store.
It satisfied all the culinary requirements for being oil without being a lipid we could use, because it was too big to be absorbed. So it came through the tract as-is. Some people weren’t, er, oil-tight and experienced some seepage.
In the upthread scenario you’d be using something to block receptors so more real sugar can be absorbed but not metabolized. To your point, then it passes through, like the fake oil. But it’s because it has the assist from the blocker rather than itself being incompatible.
I’m a little surprised there’s an existing drug that does this though. I thought excess sugar heading through the kidneys was bad.
It's very cool! It's the SGLT protein. It's actually a sodium-glucose co-transporter and is why gatorade is so effective! It's the perfect mix of salt, sugar, and water to take advantage of that very protein (where salt goes, water follows).
And yes there is a drug that targets these - it's the SGLT inhibitors and they're very in vogue right now. Ozempic and Mounjaro are the two big ones in the news right now. They act on the SGLT I (found only in the kidney) so that you urinate more sugar. They don't act on the SGLT 2 (only found in the gut) but other medications in that class act on both.
But congratulations and alas! You nearly invented gatorade and a multi-billion dollar diabetes and weight-loss drug. Hardly bone-headed ideas.
Importantly, the issue why my ideas were boneheaded was that typically there’s a lot of unknown side functions and ramifications in biology which are easily overlooked. Glp-1 based drugs weren’t discovered by deliberate hypothesis testing. Sglt2 inhibitors might be but given the number of trials it took in attacking metabolic syndrome using “logic” (avoid fat, avoid sugar, inhibit fat uptake, eat sugar substitutes, etc). This just eeems like a fluke more than merit of following simple logic into complex hormonal systems.
This is true in all medicines. Except antibiotics almost no effective medicine was “invented” by applying first principles the way you would in physics, even if initially it looked like that’s how it worked. Take chemotherapy for example. If the drug works effectively by killing all dividing cells completely, it clearly should kill you, but it doesn’t. It just kills cancers. But that’s because turns out our immune system plays a pivotal role in chemotherapy effectiveness.
From the article,
>This leakiness could help plants protect themselves from damage from bright or rapidly changing light.
I also submitted subject GRE scores which in retrospect clearly differentiated people who will attain academic success and people who won’t. The universities literally said they won’t consider the scores even if submit them. Also, ideas are not cheap. Sure you have to execute on them as well, but ideas are not cheap at all. At least not the good ones.
Kind of similar to how olestra ‘may cause anal leakage’
The obvious side-effect is that your poo becomes very fatty and disgusting.
Hence the affectionate nickname for Orlistat in the biz: "Orlyshit" (i.e. Oily Shit)
"Photosynthetically active radiation (400–700 nm) constitutes only 45% of the actual daylight. Therefore the maximum theoretical efficiency of the photosynthesis process is approximately 11%. In fact, in any case, plants don’t use all incoming sunlight (due to respiration, reflection, light inhibition and light saturation) and do not convert all harvested energy into biomass, which brings about a general photosynthetic proficiency of 3%–6% based on total solar radiation. "
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-a...
Given how well conserved this is among plants, this has probably evolved multiple times and the reason why plants arrive at it must be very strong. Like say how a lot of animals living and swimming in water look like fish even though many of the ancestors of today's "fishes" lived on land: the "fish shape" evolved multiple times.
This struck me as a bit absolute, and I immediately thought of mushrooms, but I believe they may in turn rely largely on organic matter such as plants. There are some worms and other animals that can survive on bacteria, so I suppose you could theoretically eat those and invalidate this quote. However, it seems to be more true than I immediately suspected.
We get our oxygen mostly from photosynthesis as well as a few other smaller sources (methane based, I think.)
Turns out, seasons help much of life on Earth too which is just defined by the tilt angle as it processes around the Sun.
Additionally, stars are factories for creating heavier elements. We wouldn’t have many of the requisite elements for life on Earth without them having been produced by the Sun first.
Plants (or more generally, photosynthetic life) are the most direct consumer of solar energy and thus the most abundant source of energy for other living organisms on the planet.
Unless your food chain contains a significant number of extremophiles (like something eating near hydrothermal vents), essentially everything can be traced back to photosynthesis.
Natural selection optimizes for "good enough", not "the best".
If the measure of value is 'fitness', then 'survival of the fittest' is exactly the same as saying 'survival of the best'.
'The best' does not imply singular except in cases which provide a metric which is a total ordering among contestants, which is usually far more specific than the usual usage of the word. For example, you would probably agree in general that the Olympics "is where the best go to compete", but there isn't implied a singular 'best' Olympian unless we consider only a single event and further insist that the measure is medal earned in a specific year. As you can see, to get to a singular 'the best' requires an event and a year and the rule that delivers a total ordering of goodness, but the normal English usage does not imply any of these. In fact in the normal usage, 'the best' would apply to everyone who attends the Olympics as a competitor, even alternates who do not compete in the end.