4 billion years of fixing inorganic carbon in the biosphere. Sometimes mistakes O2 for CO2. Not as fast as some enzymes, but very abundant. Here, have some phosphoglycerates about it.

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Joined 11 months ago
Cake day: December 23rd, 2023
  • RuBisCO@slrpnk.nettoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•How can I improve my handwriting?
    9·
    5 months ago

    Practice.

    Taking notes during lecture helped. Not only does it help cement the information in your mind, it is practice writing legibly enough it can be studied later. You could practice this now, before school starts, by watching something like Khan Academy.

    If your major sends you to the whiteboard often, that will help a lot, too. You will naturally improve as you do it out of necessity. Practice on the board until you can write a straight line of consistent text that doesn’t droop or curve down as it goes along.

    I second the suggestion for calligraphy in a script you like.

    Perhaps practice by trying to quickly write down song lyrics as you listen? I think that’s when I first started to improve.

    Pay attention to your classmates who can take good notes quickly. I made a friend who found my writing to be glacially slow, so I watched how they wrote to learn some tricks.

    Sorry if some of these won’t help until you’re in, but don’t worry about it too much. I’m sure your handwriting will be markedly improved by the end of even the first year.

    p.s.
    Write letters or postcards to friends.
    Try to fit your favorite quotes on a notecard.

  • RuBisCO@slrpnk.nettoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Best way to actually clean my glass shower door?
    2·
    8 months ago

    I could also be wrong, but I believe SDS has less ‘affinity’ for protons than acetic acid (which is part of the reason why detergents work so well). You’d need sulfuric acid, or something stronger, and removal from solution of its buddy ion sodium. Then I think you could protonate dodecyl sulfate.

    Now acetic acid and soaps…yeah, far more likely to generate scum. The polar head is a weaker acid.

    The importance of soap to human civilization is documented by history, but some problems associated with its use have been recognized. One of these is caused by the weak acidity (pKa ca. 4.9) of the fatty acids. Solutions of alkali metal soaps are slightly alkaline (pH 8 to 9) due to hydrolysis. If the pH of a soap solution is lowered by acidic contaminants, insoluble fatty acids precipitate and form a scum. A second problem is caused by the presence of calcium and magnesium salts in the water supply (hard water). These divalent cations cause aggregation of the micelles, which then deposit as a dirty scum.

    These problems have been alleviated by the development of synthetic amphiphiles called detergents (or syndets). By using a much stronger acid for the polar head group, water solutions of the amphiphile are less sensitive to pH changes. Also the sulfonate functions used for virtually all anionic detergents confer greater solubility on micelles incorporating the alkaline earth cations found in hard water.

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