Quite a few landmarks for me coming up! Almost 1,000 followers, 2,000 comments, $3,000 earned and we're almost at what I learnt this week number 20! Exciting! In a mundane kinda way.

Anywho, let's see what strangely counter-intuitive stuff I picked up on this week.

Monday: That Cigar Asteroid, 'Oumuamua

So there has been quite a bit of news on the first ever observed interstellar asteroid visiting our solar system and how bizarre it really is. This has been plaguing Steemit in plagiarized trash posts for some time but I thought I'd give it a proper bit of justice with my own words.

The most immediately striking feature of this asteroid is that it's gone a few steps too far in the weight loss program, now looking a little like something Zeus threw at us after stealing fire from one of his wives.

I'm saying it's long and thin.

It has a weird name, apt for a weird asteroid, which was originally thought of as a comet. Another weird feature was that its brightness varied somewhat extremely, by a factor of 10, as it spun around every 7 hours or so, somehow indicating its shape as long and thin; ten times longer than it is wide. I'm not sure how they figured that out and it's too soon to start digging into that.

Its dark red colour caused by millions of years of stellar radiation, and lack of dust implies it's a dense rocky object about 800 metres long. This bolt of rock is shooting through space away from us at a startling 95,000 km/h, or like going around the earth 2 and a bit times over the course of a Game of Thrones episode.

Scientists are excited for more than just its oddities. Because it clearly came from interstellar space, based on its hyperbolic flight path, analysing it would be a fanastic way to have a clear window into another solar system, possibly even tracking it back to the location it once originated. This is unlikely, however. The star that it came from has since moved substantially in the last 300,000 years, so it's likely the rock has been tumbling around aimlessly in the galaxy for millions of years. Still, it's an untouched record of some historical time, long, long ago.

For me, the interesting thing this brings to light is not that a cool alien object visited us, but the fact that we detected it. There are estimates that one visits us at least once a year, but we've never been able to see them because they're so faint. But with increasing numbers of ever-sharp electronic eyes in the sky, we're starting to pick out even the most elusive little rocks out there. Cool stuff!

You can read more here

Tuesday: Life on a moat of dust. Literally.

A new theory builds on the idea of panspermia - the process of life being seeded onto earth from, say, Mars after a cataclysmic asteroid event. The organically fertile debris, smashed into the depths of space could have flown to Earth and made a home for itself before evolving into us.

This idea is less impossible than it seems, because it's evident that plenty of bacteria, plants and even some small animals - famously the tardigrade - can survive in the vacuum of space. Bacteria can pretty much survive in such conditions indefinitely in some cases.

Well, to broaden the idea, researchers calculated the feasibility of organic particles in the Earth's atmosphere being smashed out of orbit by various space dust. This stellar dust typically travels around 70 kilometers per second, and it turns out if they were to collide with particles 150km up in the Earth's atmosphere, that would be more than enough to dislodge them and send them out into the eternal darkness.

This idea can naturally be reversed, with other planets' particles being smashed away and directed towards Earth, thus seeding our planet with any microscopic life that happened to be hitching a ride on that particular dust moat.

Personally I find it more likely that life simply arose here. There are plenty of very reasonable explanations of the very likely environments that could have existed around the time life began here, and no real explanation as to why that couldn't be the case. But it's nice to broaden our perspectives like this anyway - this could be how life elsewhere formed, or indeed how Earth's DNA somehow has evolved into earth-like species on a planet 17 light-years from here. Imagine that!

You can read more here

Wednesday: Save the Bees!

Last week, we looked at how fungicides were identified to be an evil killer in the shadows for bees, deeply affecting the health of individual bees and hives on the whole. This week we have a chance to actually work in their favour!

Pyrethroid pesticides are a very effective type of pesticide that arbitrarily blanket-kills insects. This is done by targeting proteins in muscles and nerves of an insect, cutting of the electrical signalling and preventing a kind of voltage gate from closing, over-stimulating the nervous system and, well, you got yourself a bug genocide. Thankfully, it has no effect of this kind on humans or mammals in general.

But this pesticide can't choose its insect, and the very precious bees are obviously directly affected by this too. Bad news.

An insect taxicologist and neurobiologist (interesting mix of professions!) Ke Dong managed to find a unique quirk in the bumble bee's sodium channels that interferes with proteins binding with the Pyrethroid pesticide, tau-fluvalinate. This brings the possibility of creating a pesticide that kills off all the pests, but specifically remains harmless to bees!

This was all very well but I wasn't exactly sure what a sodium channel was, so, quickly, sodium channels are transmembrane proteins of 2,000 or more amino acid residues.

Ok... Transmembrane simply means the protein exists across multiple cell membranes. Amino acid residue is essentially a residue left behind when two or more amino acids bind and form a peptide... a chain of amino acids.

So to clarify, sodium channels are proteins that sit around across multiple cells, made from the residue of amino acids that bonded together. Right! This really makes you appreciate the depth of work going into saving the bees!