Taking A Break -- Off The Net For Awhile -- October 5, 2022

Cut: We should know soon the OPEC+ cut decision. 

• It is interesting to see the "+" after OPEC on this one.

WTI: holds. Up about fifty cents, trading at just under $87.

• CVX: up slightly.
• DVN: up 2%. And, yet it still has a P/E under 9.00. Pays almost 7%.
• SRE: down 2%; trading under $155; P/E of 44; pays 3%.
• EPD: around $24; P/E of 11; pays 7.7%.
  

Insult:

• this is being called a Biden win: $280 million to nation's schools for mental health support;
• there are approximately 100,000 public schools in the US
• $280 million / 100,000 = $2,800 per school
• Ukraine:

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The Book Page

From Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death, Nick Lane, 2022, p. 164: 

We keep coming around to ferredoxin, the red protein, so central to all metabolism. 

Its deep antiquity and central role in life was most clearly appreciated by the great pioneer of bioinformatics, Margaret Dayhoff. ' 

The very same year that Daniel Arnon and colleagues first reported the reverse Krebs cycle, 1966, Margaret Dayhoff (working with Richard Eck) published a paper that launched a thousand ships in the journal Science. 

Dayhoff had done her degree in maths at New York University before taking a PhD in quantum chemistry at Columbia, using punched cards to calculate resonance energies of chemical bonds. 

She joined the National Biomedical Research Foundation as Associate Director, where she collaborated with the celebrated cosmologist Carl Sagan, synergising her work on bond energies with her computational skills to develop programmes that could calculate the equilibrium concentration of gases in planetary atmospheres, including Venus, Jupiter, and Mars, as well as the primordial atmosphere of the Earth. 

I'm struck that Carl Sagan was at the time married to Lynn Margulis; whatever else he did, perhaps his greatest bequest to humanity was kindling the cosmological perspective of two of the most brilliant women of the twentieth century, 

Uniquely, Dayhoff could link a deep understanding of the quantum mechanisms underpinning planetary processes such as photosynthesis (grounded in bond energies) with her pioneering computational work on comparing protein sequences -- the basis of modern phylogenetics -- to reconstruct the history of life on Earth like never before. 

The beginning of it all was was her classic paper on ferredoxin in 1966.

Abstract:

The structure of present-day ferredoxin, with its simple, inorganic active site and its functions basic to photon-energy utilization, suggests the incorporation of its prototype into metabolism very early during biochemical evolution, even before complex proteins and the complete modern genetic code existed. 

The information in the amino acid sequence of ferredoxin enables us to propose a detailed reconstruction of its evolutionary history. 

Ferredoxin has evolved by doubling a shorter protein, which may have contained only eight of the simplest amino acids. 

This shorter ancestor in turn developed from a repeating sequence of the amino acids alanine, aspartic acid or proline, serine, and glycine. 

We explain the persistence of living relics of this primordial structure by invoking a conservative principle in evolutionary biochemistry: The processes of natural selection severely inhibit any change in a well-adapted system on which several other essential components depend.