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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Pretty sure there are crops you can rotate in that replenish the soil.

    Potassium is produced by breaking down potassium-rich rocks. Plants cannot replenish it like they replenish nitrogen.

    There’s also a literal shitload of organic waste that humans generate that can be used for a similar purpose instead of burying it in landfills.

    We do produce a lot of potassium-rich waste - sewage and food waste, for example - but most of it is also rich in other nutrients. So you can add a little of it, but adding too much of it can cause other problems (like eutrophication).

    The other solution is to buy potassium fertiliser. A significant amount of this is produced in Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, and I’m guessing its trade is being affected by the ongoing war.












  • ‘Junk DNA’ is any DNA whose purpose was unknown when the article / book was written. But to return to your question, not necessarily.

    First, we are usually concerned with the (dis)advantages of mutations when they occur in coding regions, which are definitely not junk DNA.

    Second, just because a sequence does not encode any useful information does not mean it is useless. For example, it could be holding a coding region away from another, so both can be transcribed at the same time. Or it could be structurally important in the way the chromosome is folded.