• TWeaK@lemmy.today
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    3 days ago

    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.social
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      3 days ago

      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

    • espurr@sopuli.xyz
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      2 days ago

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

      • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        > 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.”

  • Aniki@feddit.orgOP
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    3 days ago

    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.orgOP
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        3 days ago

        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.world
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          3 days ago

          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.orgOP
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            3 days ago

            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?

  • Rose@slrpnk.net
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    2 days ago

    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”