Life is amazing. Can anyone recommend good modern starting points to someone who would want to learn more about how living beings work (from bottom up)? It has been a while since I actively delved into Biology (my school days).
The research into the origen of life looks at bottom up fundamentals (how they work) of all cells since the solar system was formed. You could start with the slides in this lecture and read the underlying papers and all the references in all those papers. You probably can find these references also in all the books he wrote. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBiIDwBOqQA
Maybe an educational text for the laymen has summarised this recently but I'm not aware of one. Most Biology from your school days have been rewritten.
I will have to re-read Molecular Biology of the Cell, 7th Edition, 2022. I read the 3th edition and it has changed dramatically since.
Get any modern undergraduate Intro Biology textbook like Campbell. These are fantastic books: beautifully illustrated and clearly written, and way better than popular science books at the mall bookstore.
The first few Units cover all the basics: chemistry of life and energy, molecular biology, cell biology, and genetics. From there you can branch out into anything.
> Get any modern undergraduate Intro Biology textbook [...] These are fantastic books
Curious how perspectives vary. I would have said there's basically nothing available, textbooks being horribly wretched.
I don't know of anything which takes a "bottom up", rough quantitative, engineering first-principles intro to cell bio, let alone to biology. No whys and hows of building close to thermal noise energy levels. No focus on pervasive multi-scale cross-cutting strategies for localization and compartmentalization. No energy budgets, not feel for reasonable numbers, no... sigh. When you see a nifty foundational insight mentioned in passing in a research talk, it's a really good bet it won't be in textbooks any year soon. One of the causal threads leading up to TFA, the Harvard bionumbers database, was born out of someone's 'it's absurdly hard to find numbers'.
Chatting with a cell bio tome publisher years ago, about what absurdly implausible resources would be needed to do something transformatively better, the snark for "but it has 100 authors!" was "nifty - and how many for the second page?". Maybe now with AI we can start nibbling away at this faster.
I can recommend "The song of the cell" as a starting point. If you prefer textbooks, maybe "Life: The Science of Biology". I have a translated non-english copy and besides some math issues it's a nice overview, but I'm not a biologist.
I'd say learning things on your own, even if they take time, is still better as you don't have to actively force yourself to develop that mindset. We often rush towards our goal without realizing how important the journey (small steps) is. Isn't reaching the goal more worthwhile if you have enjoyed the journey along the way? Isn't that what it means to be human?
Microsoft has gone so deep down the gutter, it is almost unbelievable. I am waiting for the day their profits start taking a hit due to a collective boycott.
The quality of Office is very rapidly declining; it seems that the entire team has moved to forcing AI into every feature instead of fixing any issues. The web version is barely usable (esp compared to Google's versions) and the desktop is quickly getting worse seemingly every day.
I have not used Azure for a few years now; back when I did use it, it seemed pretty good.
That applies to all teams not only Office, even Aspire now has AI on the dashboard, and they proudly made use of AI building the new Aspire CLI experience.
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