ilyavc

[ilyavc]

My favorite Kingdom Hearts fact is that one of the biggest plot-holes that Nomura has never been able to meaningfully retcon or write his way out, a plot-hole so big that it fundamentally breaks the very rules the series is written on…

Is the existence of Steamboat Willie

Let me explain for the uninitiated:

In Kingdom Hearts 2, there’s a small detour in the story involving Maleficent trying to invade Disney Castle, the home of King Mickey. She can’t step foot in the castle due to an artefact of pure light that wards off darkness locked in the basement.

Pete, who is working for Maleficent, opens a door into the past (Before Disney Castle, this land was known as Timeless River) and decides to remove the artifact from it’s place in time so it won’t be there to stop them from getting in.

Sora, Donald, and Goofy chase Pete into the past thanks to another magic door provided by Merlin, and through some shenanigans involving old cartoons and teaming up with Pete’s past-self, they lock the door the villains are using, and return the artefact to it’s proper place so it can exist in the present.

You with me so far? Pretty straightforward-ish time-travel plot right?

Here’s where it goes off the rails.

Time travel would go on to become a staple of Kingdom Hearts going forward and would come with a very strict set of rules over how it operates:

1. You can only travel to a point in time where a version of yourself exists

2. You basically give up your body to do so, and travel as a disembodied soul unless you have a vessel to inhabit

3. You can’t alter the past in a meaningful way, what’s going to happen will happen

4. You lose your memories of said trip once you return, but your actions could leave a lingering instinct on your other self that could influence their decisions

“Wait” you may be thinking “Why should anyone go through all those hoops? Wasn’t time travel super simple that first time?”

And you’d be totally right, because the existence of Timeless River completely renders all of these rules and restrictions meaningless. 

There is no version of Sora that existed in Timeless River before he step foot there, everyone kept their bodies, the trio and Pete were able to mess with the timeline as freely as they pleased, and they all very much remember their trip. 

Nomura has never been able to meaningfully explain this super simple, easy way of time travel and the more convoluted method co-existing other than a cheap-throwaway line from one of the villains saying that Merlin “broke the rules” 

The hilarious part about this line is that it implies that PETE of all characters is actually more powerful than the actual villain of the series, because Pete opened a door into Timeless River through sheer willpower and nostalgia for “the good old days”

But the all-knowing chess-master of a villain who had an evil plan several decades in the making with countless moving parts and contingencies to account for had to use the roundabout, more complicated method of time travel where a lot could go wrong.

Pete though? Dude just casually broke all the rules of time travel because he felt like it. He’s just built different.

TL;DR: Steamboat Willie breaks Kingdom Hearts lore in half, Pete is more powerful than Master Xehanort, and I fucking love this beautiful trainwreck of a series you guys it means so much to me

I love Kingdom hearts so much.

[ilyavc]

New Battle Tactic: punch ‘em to death

Everybody has at least once in their lives taken some antibiotics. These medicins are known for their very efficient ways of exterminating bacterial pathogens that make other organisms sick, and are widely used for treating diseases today.

But using too much antibiotics is not good in general. People tend to use them for every small disease they get. Due to this overusage, many bacteria develop a resistance to one or many antibiotics so they won’t be killed by them anymore.

Typically, antibiotics are seen as ‘keys’ that fit in ‘locks’ which are present on the bacteria itself (Joseph Ndieyira). By fitting in those locks, the anitbiotics can disrupt processes in the bacterial cell. These disruptions can range from destroying the cell membrane to interfering with the bacterial DNA. When a bacteria develops a resistance for an antibiotic, the lock has changed a little bit so the antibiotic can’t fit in the lock and start a reaction. The usual way of dealing with this phenomenon is decreasing the overall use of antibiotics and using mixtures of different antibiotics so the bacteria resistant to one antibiotic might be killed and stop the resistance from spreading. All these methods are based on the biochemical reactions these antibiotics start in a bacterial cell.

Yet recently, a new discovery was made. Scientists discovered that some microbiotics use sheer mechanical force to disrupt the bacterial cell. Instead of unlocking the lock and starting biochemical reactions, they simply punch a hole through the bacterial cell wall which is of course rather lethal to the bacterial cell itself. Antibiotics that were underused to treat superresistant bacteria, because of resistance, seem to be more effective using this method than other very strong ‘biochemical’ antibiotics.

This way of treating bacterial cells would be a very great way to deal with, I think. It would be harder to become resistant to these kinds of treatments. But it is important to be cautious to prevent the same mistake from happening twice. This can be a powerfull treatment along with the ‘biochemical antibiotics’, but we need to be careful for bacterial resistance against this or it won’t be of use anymore.

source: http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/hulklike-antibiotics-physically-tearing-superbugs-apart/

[ilyavc]

Octopi don’t believe in evolution

Octopi aren’t the most straight-forward animals nature has to offer. In the last couple of years, these creatures have proven to be one of a kind. From solving puzzles to impressive camouflage, the octopi continue to impress researchers.

Even today it’s shown that these animals are very exceptional beings. Researchers discovered that octopi ‘evolve’ in another way than other animals due to intense editing of their RNA.

Normally, animals evolve due to change in their DNA, called mutations. These changes (very rarely) can result in new characteristics that are acquired by the organism. In all organisms DNA is converted to RNA that is used to synthesize proteins. These proteins are then responsible for the characteristics of the organism. RNA is basically a copy of DNA but whereas DNA is a dubble-stranded molecule, RNA is single stranded and thus translatable so proteins can be synthesized. It takes a long time to actually see the changes that occur in DNA. That’s what makes evolution such a long process.

Octopi, however can change their appearance much faster due to intensively editing to their RNA and so producing other proteins. These proteins help them survive in their current environment more than the classical proteins. This RNA editing minimalizes DNA changes in octopi. It is thought that the genome of an octopus now is more similar to that of an octopus millions of years ago than if we compare the genomes of a cat now and a cat millions of years ago.

It’s very intriguing, in my opinion, that nature has such diverse ways of living. Even the most basic process in life and evolution has exceptions apparently and I think it’s pretty awesome how nature continues to learn us things.

sources: http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/octopuses-are-even-more-amazing-than-we-thought/

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-04/mbl-c040417.php

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/curiouser-and-curiouser-octopuss-evolution-is-even-stranger-than-thought/

[ilyavc]

No vaccines, No school

Whoever has been around long enough on the internet, might have heard the phrase ‘vaccines cause autism’ or something similar. Recently I found this article about Australia sending kids home if they aren’t vaccinated.

Some of you might think this is unfair, but I would like to explain with my knowledge on the subject why this isn’t bad at all.

Let me first explain what vaccines are and what they do. Vaccines are simply cells of the bacteria or virus particles that makes you sick, but they have been treated in such a way that they are now unable to infect you. However, they are still that specific bacteria with the same, unique structures. And thus, vaccines still trigger an immune respons from the host, like normal bacteria, but they do not make the host sick. The white blood cells, who are responsible for that immune respons, ‘remember’ that bacteria, or more specifically, the immune system remembers the antigenes that the bacteria produced and that would make you sick. Because of that, the host can attack that bacteria the next time he gets infected by it, but much more efficiently and faster. Therefore, the host has gained immunity.

So why is it a good idea from “Down Under” to send children home if they are not vaccinated? Well, these kids are incredibely vulnerable to completly preventable diseases. The bacteria that cause these diseases can be found everywhere, especially at school, where there are a lot of people. If you walk unvaccinated around these places, you can get seriously sick from such preventable diseases that could actually be lethal. 

So what Australia did, is really something to protect these children from getting extremely sick and in extreme cases, die. I think it also persuades people to get their kids, and themselves for that matter treated, so they don’t get sick all the time. Even though it hasn’t had the most scientific breakthroughs in history, Australia does apparently know to keep up and make people aware of the possible risks.

source:http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/australia-set-keep-unvaccinated-kids-school/

[ilyavc]

Drunk... on euphoria

By now, you should have heard about TRAPPIST. And no, I’m not talking about the belgian beer. I’m talking about about some of the 7 newly found planets on a nearby star.

These planets are very similar to our Earth, especially the first three, named TRAPPIST-1e, f and g. Because these planets are rumored to have oceans on them, there’s a lot of fuzz going on about wether or not there could be life present on these planets.

While this is very exciting news for many fields of science, I looked at this with biochemistry in mind because biochemistry studies the mechanisms in organisms that are essential to support life, as we know it. I say that because it’s very difficult to imagine sustainable lifeforms that use different elements as the base components for organic molecules than those life on Earth uses, like carbon and hydrogen. These form such stable structures that it might seem impossible to not use them as the base of life. 

Of course there might be elements in space which we don’t know of and which are used for some kind of ‘other’ life. But this is pure speculation. Thus, it’s more useful for scientists to look for the kind of life we know here on Earth.

I think there’s a high potential for finding life on these planets or on other planets for that matter. There’s no way earth is the only planet where life could have occured in the entire universe. It’s always very excited to hear/read that we may have found life on other planets. However, I think we should be aware of what that could mean. I’m not talking about alien invasion and such ( which could be possible, in theory), but about the pathogens that could occur when we decide to visit those planets. The atmospheres of the discovered planets are thinner than Earth’s atmosphere. That’s why life on TRAPPIST would likely be adapted against the UV radiation of the dwarf sun of that solar system compared to life forms on Earth, which are relatively vulnerable against UV radiation. (Radiation is perhaps a reason why there isn’t life on the TRAPPIST planets).

There’s definitely a need to thoroughly study the life forms which we may find before we visit (and maybe colonize) these planets. For all we know there might be some kind of bacteria immune to our medicines that may cause a mass extinction. It could maybe even cause genetic diseases or mutations which we never experienced before. This may be the worst case scenario but still. There must be caution not to underestimate this and I think a lot of people don’t think of these things when there’s news about extraterrestrial life.

So, while discovering life on these TRAPPIST-planets would be an excellent breakthrough, we must not get too ‘drunk’ on our achievements en forget necessary precautions to protect ourselves from the possible dangers we may encounter when interacting with these extraterrestrial lifeforms.

source: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/22/world/new-exoplanets-discovery-nasa/