Today I Learned

Isn't it that rapping cartoon dog from the PS1?

I got a degree in microbiology in 95 and I did not know about these. Heck I even did a rotation in an xray crystallography lab which was super into cellular structures.

A super important nuclear structure related to calcium mobilization was only discovered a few years ago. It will take years before it ever appears in bachelor's textbooks, let alone high school material. Cellular biology is far for complete, and biology as a whole is still completely filled with open questions.

We do suffer a lot with a lack of funding though. If your research isn't immediately important for a medication, good luck working with a far from optimal budget.

Ask any expert in almost any field of science. If they're good at their jobs, they'll mostly tell you the same thing about their field.

The scariest thing in the world is that you can apply that to nearly everything.

we think about people 100 or 500 years ago and it seems absurd just how little they knew about health and the body, but hopefully we'll look the same to our descendants in as many years

The absolute, utterly bullshit is what leads to other advances and a better understanding of the basics. For example, optical storage technology is a direct result of a federally funded study on how moth eyes gather and utilize light.

It's astonishing to me just how confidently people, often those who've never even studied the body, will assert they definitely know how things work. DNA is the big one for me, as there's an entire "layer" of genetic function which we know almost nothing about. We may have mapped the atomic structure of DNA, and identified a number of sequences of base pairs which can be correlated with certain traits, yet how DNA "folds" and why remains almost a complete mystery. Many think that scientists have reached a level where we can splice our genetic code as though it were a computer program to make it do this or that, yet in reality attempts to do so almost never work, usually resulting in sterility or death.

Cells make too many of them to not have a purpose. There is a large energy cost to manufacturing 10k-100k per cell. That's enough for selection to remove them if they were useless.

What's probably going on is they have an important but uncommon purpose. Like a fire extinguisher. They are in most buildings but a lot of people will never see a situation where one is needed.

Borderland/Fallout crossover is episode 6. Vault Hunters get a surprise!

Should be called the chungus then

that wouldn't be an unfounded hypothesis. surface area to volume ratio is extremely important in cells. by artificially lowering the volume (by taking up a lot of it with a structure) the cell can make better use of its existing surface area

though it looks like the volume of these structures aren't that large comparatively

This is seriously interesting yet unsettling at the same time that these are not being studied more. For whatever reason I have a feeling that they are going to be way more important someday since all creatures have them.

Lead researcher has a youtube channel linked at the bottom of that article, too.

The key to surviving global thermonuclear war has been hiding in our cells the whole time?