11 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 39.6 ms ] thread
Reminds me of Prime Curios, which is trivia about prime numbers. https://primes.utm.edu/curios/ They could make an interesting mash-up. Like a Vornoi scale made of prime numbers with the occurrence of biological numbers between them. It's well into the territory of a weird gematria at that point, but in terms of looping people into studying them with trivia, it would be fun.
This is a more useful resource than one would think. When I switched from studying math to biology, I was surprised that most graduate biology textbooks never provided these basic numbers --- average diffusion time of a protein across a cell, for instance --- which really helps in making back-of-the-envelope calculations.
I'm a little sorry I clicked on "Net population change in North American birds"

https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?id=117281&...

Could someone with knowledge of birds and/or the methodology explain why the confidence intervals for the coasts and Arctic tundra biomes are so wide?

Are those bird populations just that difficult to count or estimate, is the data set just insanely small (if so, why?), or is there some other reason?

The full database (27 MB) can be downloaded from: https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/resources.aspx

It is a surprisingly simple single excel sheet or a single table with 14,248 rows. I was expecting an SQLite database with multiple relationally linked tables. Anyway the simplicity and the fact that it is a single spreadsheet makes it easy to browse through, and for most rows, a reference is provided.

Note to the maintainers: The last 3-4 entries are spam.

Why do they need to refrigerate COVID mRNA vaccines?

Because the mean lifetime of mRNA is 5 minutes (at body temperature).

Arrhenius acceleration (or deceleration) with cold temperatures is the only viable trick. But even then, it's going to disappear quickly once it hits a target cell and the liposome is absorbed. Probably not a great half-life even then.

https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?id=108592&...

No this is due to degradation from nucleases. In fact the number you linked is specific to bacteria. Lifetime of mRNA in eukaryotes is on the order of hours, and this is due to active degradation as well.
If this is interesting to y’all, I highly recommend checking out their book Cell Biology By The Numbers. It’s lots of numbers like in this database, but with the hows and whys.

http://book.bionumbers.org/