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Primal Matter
Student of Institutions



Registered: 10/27/19
Posts: 487
Loc: Brisbane
Last seen: 1 year, 10 months
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Chirality 2
#27180395 - 02/01/21 06:45 AM (2 years, 11 months ago) |
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Do Vines Twine Counter-Clockwise Only?
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To get back to the original question of chirality, most people believe (including me until recently) that a species of plant only nutates with a specific handedness. This idea is so prevalent that recently Italian botanists described a mutant plant whose roots circumnutate left-handed (clockwise) instead of right-handed. Johnsson, a Norwegian botansist, and world authority on circumnutation, pointed out recently in a paper that many plants can change their direction of rotation while they are still growing. It's not known what causes this. The question of chirality in circumnutation is still very open.
Tendril perversion
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The phenomenon was known to Charles Darwin, who wrote in 1865,
A tendril ... invariably becomes twisted in one part in one direction, and in another part in the opposite direction... This curious and symmetrical structure has been noticed by several botanists, but has not been sufficiently explained
Must the Molecules of Life Always be Left-Handed or Right-Handed?
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On Earth, the amino acids characteristic of life are all “left-handed” in shape, and cannot be exchanged for their right-handed doppelgänger. Meanwhile, all sugars characteristic of life on Earth are “right-handed.” The opposite hands for both amino acids and sugars exist in the universe, but they just aren’t utilized by any known biological life form. (Some bacteria can actually convert right-handed amino acids into the left-handed version, but they can’t use the right-handed ones as is.) In other words, both sugars and amino acids on Earth are homochiral: one-handed.
Is nature exclusively left handed? Researchers study chilled atoms to find out
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Handedness refers to the orientation of the spin of a particle; if you curl the fingers of your left hand to follow the spin and your thumb points along the direction of motion, the particle is left-handed. No right-handed particles (in the limit of zero mass) have ever been observed, but there is no compelling reason why they should not exist. In fact, many proposed extensions to the standard model propose right-handed particles do exist and are just difficult to detect. The improved precision of asymmetry measurements using modern techniques can improve searches for right-handed particles as well as test other fundamental aspects of the standard model.
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RenegadeMycologist
On the case



Registered: 12/05/20
Posts: 3,817
Loc: Serbia
Last seen: 7 days, 12 hours
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Chirality is really wicked, I often contemplate about it
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l e a r n i n g t h i n g s
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RJ Tubs 202



Registered: 09/20/08
Posts: 6,010
Loc: USA
Last seen: 15 hours, 1 minute
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Quote:
Primal Matter said:
Tendril perversion
The phenomenon was known to Charles Darwin, who wrote in 1865,
A tendril ... invariably becomes twisted in one part in one direction, and in another part in the opposite direction... This curious and symmetrical structure has been noticed by several botanists, but has not been sufficiently explained
Fascinating! I've never heard of this.
This behavior must provide some type of competitive advantage. But what?!
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