Thaliana

The News Agents has almost entirely replaced TRIP for me. I still like some of their Leading interviews but TRIP itself I've gone right off.

I'd highly recomend you give reverse sear a go. It definitely works best with thick steaks but a nice low oven temp 120C (250F) and pull when the steak is 40C (120F), then into a ripping hot pan with oil in it gives a fantastic sear.

I'm not suggesting it's better than your method or anything but well worth trying imo!

An easy way to convert lbs -> kg is divide by 2 and subtract 10%

why is it significant that we slice like a[i:i+4:i+4] rather than just a[i:i+4]?

Well I had never seen that "full slice" expression syntax before. It turns out that it's important because it controls the capacity of the new slice. The capacity of the new slice is now i+4 - i.

So by using the full slice expression you get a slice of length 4 and capacity 4. Without doing this the capacity would be equal to the capacity of the original slice.

I suppose that by controlling the capacity that you eliminate the bounds check.

The way that I learned to write the WHERE clause of a SQL update statement first was updating an entire column of a very important SQL table in a TV stations automation software database.

I also took CNBC off air briefly, although that was their man's fault as he told me to unplug the wrong video server.

Checking the article again I got it from the "More Information" box at the bottom of the article. The paper is titled "In vivo evidence for a regulatory role of phosphorylation of Arabidopsis Rubisco activase at the Thr78 site" so that means A. thaliana.

The picture is certainly misleading, I guess they just grabbed a generic "plants in a rainforest" picture for evocative reasons.

The plants used in this study are Arabidopsis thaliana, which is a very commonly used model organism in plant biology.

I think it's not a particularly wild assumption that a lot of plants will react in this way. The MYC2 protein and jasmonic acid are important regulators of plant defenses so priming of defenses when it rains makes sense. There are pathogens (such as Pseudomonas syringae) that can trick a plant into opening its stomate, which are airholes on the leaves, as a means of gaining access to the interior of the leaf.

As the paper describes how the mechanical action of rain can wash pathogens around the leaf or onto other plants I think it's reasonable to think other plants would react like this.

The interplay between the jasmonic acid pathway and other plant hormone pathways is super interesting as plants, in general, have two ways of defending themselves. For pathogens that feed on dead tissue the name of the game is to keep the cells alive (jasmonic acid can be thought of as generally responsible for this sort of response), whereas for pathogens that feed on live tissue then the plant will kill of cells local to the infection site in order to deny the pathogen food (salicylic acid is largely responsible here).