Quantum Physics

the article from 10 years ago goes into more details, and even very different details. She's not giving the whole picture.

https://www.space.com/6319-mars-methane-geology-biology.html

very irreverent, and very true.

This is the first guy I've found explaining science who's as adorable as all the delightful young women explaining science. He's helped me figure out what the difference is: the women physically express their enthusiasm for the intellectual concepts they are explaining. The men and women are equally good at explaining, but the women are just more fun to watch. And then there's this guy, demonstrating it's not just their sex appeal.

If you decide to watch this you'll find him referring over and over to the Feynman Lectures on Physics, which is revered by physics majors but probably unknown outside that group.

The legs are pretty wide.  It looks to me like the only reason it fell over is either one leg was on a pretty big boulder (or it's on a steep slope), or they somehow came down at an angle.

To my eye if the center of mass is 1/3 down from the top, this thing would have to tip at more than a 30 degree angle before falling over. As far as I know there's no gusts or moon bears to knock it over, so it comes down to landing site or pilot error. Most likely a boulder. Neal Armstrong gave a sudden last burst of reserve fuel to avoid landing on a boulder field.

I read Penrose's The Emperor's New Clothes decades ago. Most of it has no direct connection to consciousness - the clearest explanation of Godel's incompleteness theorem I've read is in there - but he eventually sticks his neck out in the last chapter. I found his ruminations on consciousness to be every bit as unconvincing as everyone else did. He even makes the school-boyish assumption that because neural activity is seen in the brain a few seconds before the "mind" is aware of a new thought or action that this is evidence that something mysterious and beyond current scientific explanation is going on. Poppycock: our "conscious" realizations are simply the end of a complicated physical process. Our knee jerks when hit by a hammer before we realize it and can do anything about it; this doesn't hint at any mysterious new physics in play. Penrose's attempt to link consciousness to quantum gravity remains a ridiculous thought from an otherwise very accomplished scientist/mathematician.

It should be noted that "quantum effects" are largely nothing to get excited about. All of chemistry is based on quantum effects. It's just that sometimes quantum effects we are not used to seeing are amplified by things like these tubes, so our intuition may not be expecting these flashes of light, etc.

All in all I think the role of tubules are interesting, but all of cell biology is galloping into new discoveries at breakneck speed, so this is just one of many new discoveries.

I've showcased this brilliant young lady before. Here she shows how the 3 body problem is related to chaos theory. Now I'm more educated than most on these topics, but only this gal made chaos theory obvious by linking it to saddle points and diverging paths. Somehow I'd never seen that before and it tickles me to the bone.