Your maths doesn't seem right. You can estimate mutation rates very easily, and you don't end up at crazy numbers. The sequence space explored by evolution is tiny compared to the possibilities and closely interlinked. A simple example is comparing haemoglobin sequences from different animals.
The EU, like almost every democracy ever, is a "representative democracy":
> Representative democracy is a system where citizens vote for officials (representatives) to make laws and political decisions on their behalf, rather than voting on every issue directly, making governance of large populations more efficient while holding elected leaders accountable through regular elections. It's also called an indirect democracy and is the most common form of democracy, seen in the UK (MPs) or India (Members of Parliament).
Direct democracy has historically been completely impracticable. And even with modern comms, I still don't see a way of doing it in practice, personally. The direct democracy of ancient Greece was notoriously corrupt.
It was possible to obtain them in Edinburgh 25 years ago, but it was rare. It was more of a meme than a popular choice, based around the Scottish love of deep frying absolutely everything.
I recommend scrolling to the next article about the giant AI-generated Christmas image/Lovecraft Eldritch horror on a shopping centre in Kingston (London). It is glorious.
> This cast doubt on the long-established view that life was made possible when organisms started producing oxygen via photosynthesis, which requires sunlight, about 2.7 billion years ago.
So ... life began because it started producing oxygen via photosynthesis? I think they oopsed the word "multicellular" or "complex". A low-grade article and a long shot of a theory, but maybe not impossible.
Yeah... it seems to me that this kind of circular reasoning has become widely acceptable by people lately, they seem to lack some basic understanding of logic or something.
Sometimes, it works, like when there's a feedback loop and X causes Y which makes X stronger, causing more of Y... but in this case, they're saying "organisms (literally life) started producing oxygen, which originated life". I would agree with you they mean "originated complex life" but they repeat the claim later: "Deep-sea discovery calls into question the origins of life," the Scottish Association for Marine Science said...".
It’s thought that the most common habitable environment in the universe is in underground oceans which are generic in outer solar system and probably interstellar bodies.
but without energy input from sunlight it is hard to believe you could get more complex organisms or ecosystems, but if you had some oxygen from chemistry that might make a difference.
Earth is a glowing ball of magma and semi-liquid stone, with a tiny solid crust where it has cooled off. There is plenty of energy there in heat, nuclear decay, elements that could chemically react and release energy, etc.
On this sun-blasted surface life that uses sunlight can outcompete anything that doesn't use it. But that doesn't mean those other energy sources aren't viable on their own
"but without energy input from sunlight it is hard to believe you could get more complex organisms or ecosystems" Where did you pull this from? Why couldn't complex organisms form without sunlight?
Some editors want to simplify everything a lot. I can heard the hypothetical editor in this case: "aerobic life" -> "what's aerobic? Too complicated Joe. I'm gonna red-pen it. Write just 'life'. See? Better, right? Now, Joe, does everybody know that organisms are clumps of church organs? Maybe you want to put a footnote somewhere?"
Shutting down and starting up again can draw more power than sleeping/other low power mode. e.g. airplane mode on a phone is probably better than turning the device off for the night. Old dumb phones used to sip power when switched off so the alarm would work.
No idea with desktops, but I wouldn't be surprised if suspend used less power than stop/start for overnight in some cases.
There is a biannual structural prediction contest called CASP [1], in which a set of newly determined structures is used to benchmark the prediction methods. Some of these structures will be "novel", and so can be used to estimate the performance of current methods on predicting "structure that we have no baseline to start with".
CASP-style assessments are something that should done for more research fields, but it's really hard to persuade funders and researchers to put up the money and embargo the data as required.
