I Told You So - 26 August 2024

So, it was last night that I elevated Dr. McElhone to the long-term (if not permanent) spot at the top of the page. And, boy howdy!! What should I find today? Derek Lowe (you really ought to read him) just posted an essay on the low-level chemistry of cells. Since my biology was one year in high school and chemistry two years in college, I can't claim to be an adept in the field. But I've long wondered how it is that we (well, the actual scientists) can know how these molecules behave? Can we only know now what we know due to electron microscopy and such? Until the Bohr model, how did we know what water looked like? And so on. A fun read.

The authors of the new paper linked above find that the ppGpp system is a very good mimic of "sliding mode control", a control method for nonlinear systems that one might have thought was rather advanced for a bacterium to implement. But they're not working it out mathematically - instead, as usual, there have been two or three billion years of do-or-die optimization that arrived at it.

Turns out, Dr. McElhone is right again. Not to mention Darwin, of course. Oh, and Mother Earth is really 6,000 years old.