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  • This is a plot point in one of my most favourite science fiction novels by Roger Zelazny... bit of a spoiler, so ROT13:

    _Qbbejnlf va gur Fnaq_

    which still has my favourite life situation for a protagonist (room, board, tuition and generous stipend so long as he attends his uncle's alma mater until such time as he graduates....)

    by WillAdams
  • Related to this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror-image_life
    by jacob_rezi
  • Congratulations to Professor Soai on winning the Nobel Prize. The discovery of asymmetric autocatalysis is truly groundbreaking, and as a fellow Japanese, I am incredibly proud of this achievement.
    by Gensui
  • Cool, brings back some memories from grad school. Always found these types of reactions with self-reenforcing quite interesting.

    Reminds me of another paper where just stirring a solution or not would determine the chirality of crystals formed and gives an idea how highly chiral environments can arise from "nothing":

    Chiral symmetry breaking in sodium chlorate crystallizaton https://doi.org/10.1126/science.250.4983.975

    by mhrmsn
  • Fun fact: his family name in kanji 硤合 is so rare that most people don't even know how to read it thus most japanese news sites using a hiragana translation そあい
    by haunter
  • >Other than life itself, no one had achieved this feat.

    Yeah, when you put it that way it sounds pretty impresive.

    by PowerElectronix
  • The chirality of biomolecules is also the source of the differentiation of left and right in a developing embryo.

    Cilia form that are tilted toward the tail of the embryo. The chirality of the protein motors driving them causes them to turn clockwise, which creates a leftward flow of water.

    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1180515/

    https://hms.harvard.edu/news/telling-left-right-organ-develo...

    by pfdietz
  • I remember first learning about chirality in my biochemistry course in college, and it was definitely a mind-blower. I had already started to understand that molecules had 3d structures, but the idea (and attempting to visualize it mentally) of mirror image molecules stretched my brain significantly.

    It's also still amazing to me how people first recognized this: poking around looking at the crystals that form in the bottom of a wine under a microscope, noticing that some of them were mirror images of the other, and then seperating them manually with tweezer, dissolving them into two different solutions, and demonstrating that they rotated light in opposite directions.

    by dekhn

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