Penguin Vibes

Ambassador Quercus Alba:

More under the cut!

For my project, we were trying to identify microbes that could use partially treated plastic as a food source and break it down further. The carbon bonds in our daily plastics are really hard to get at and break, hence the bad degradation, so breaking some of those bonds through heat and chemicals first can help microbes get access to them. Once we identify a microbe that can do this, we could test giving them slightly less degraded plastic to live on until they develop a way to eat it and go until they either get back to normal plastic or hit a wall where the microbe can't progress anymore (which may be likely).

An alternative approach to breeding (although you don't 'breed' most microbes since they reproduce asexually but instead find strains with mutations that lead to desired changes) would be trying to predict an enzyme that could break the bonds in plastic, engineering it, and putting it in microbes to test if it works. On one hand it could overcome any natural halt selection has but would be initially harder to discover.

The best solution would probably be to find the microbe that can eat the partially degraded plastic, figure out what enzyme is doing the work, then see how the enzyme could be improved to work through plastic in its default state.

Once you have that, the next consideration would be what byproducts are created from eating plastic? Part of the project was hoping that the microbe that could eat plastic would produce a useful byproduct that could be harvested, as an unfortunate reality of our current world is that if it's not profitable it probably won't take hold. But if we wish to put this in a living organism, we need to make sure it won't produce a harmful byproduct, or if it does, then ensuring the organism can quickly turn it harmless before it builds up.

Once all of that is figured out, the next hardest thing would be ensuring that whatever gut microbe you put the plastic eating gene in continues to express it. Since plastic is so hard to use it would probably prefer to use any glucose lying around first, and if that runs out then switch to eating plastic. We could try removing its ability to eat glucose (or whatever other compounds it lives off of), but then it would be less competitive in the gut environment and would require a steady source of plastic in order to not die off.

maybe from designs and aesthetics + being the main prosecutor that goes against the respective naruhodo (ryuunosuke/phoenix) i can understand it but fundamentally they are very different to me, especially with miles from the trilogy

miles edgeworth is very black and white in his thinking, if he is in court he must win. to win is to have the client declared guilty, and nothing else matters to him. it’s implied that he’s forged evidence before to get his verdict in court (though these are just rumors) he doesn’t see the court system as a way to call out those who’ve done wrong things and save the people drowning because of others, he sees it as a game where he is the winner. it doesnt matter if this is because of manfred von karma because either way this is his thought process too. in investigations he literally sees conversations as a chess game!! a game where your objective is to win by overtaking the other person!!

barok van zieks would not share this thought process, not at all.. the only reason why he started prosecuting again was because he knew that magnus mcguilded was an evil man and wanted to lock him away for taking advantage of the underprivileged.. he believes in justice, and the reason for everything he does is to find the underlying truth. yes, he is close minded and racist by assuming ryuunosuke’s character because the man who killed his brother and ran a rampage across britian (as far as he knew) was japanese, but in the eyes of the law he is actually quite open. when he learns that klint was the true killer, he didn’t vehemently deny it but let a quiet grief sink into him

if anything, i think that barok van zieks is more similar to klavier gavin. they both see the courtroom not as a game to win or settle a score but rather a place to represent people in need and put away those whove harmed others, but have been steered away from the truth by an older figure in their life who also has a position in the law (kristoph, stronghart)

EDIT: ive also just remembered another similarity between klavier and barok. both of them had someone close to them, someone they trusted, in a position of law enforcement, end up as a murderer!! for klavier it was daryan and him killing someone during turnabout serenade, with daryan also being an interpol agent (? i think) aand for barok it waa klint, his brother, who ended up being the professor and klint was a nobleman and also a very respected prosecutor (i think? i don’t remember what specifically) both of these were betrayals that changed how they thought about people and who they trusted…

Susato is Ryuu's friend and his peer. Susato might be his assistant, but functionally, at times, she is much closer to being his co-counsel, a lawyer with her own merit, solving the cases by his side. This comes to a head when she takes up the mantel of both the defence lawyer and being Naruhodo. Susato might be asking Kazuma for wisdom and courage for the task (standing in front of a grave where he is not in and never was) but when it comes to actually taking a page out of someone's book, it's Ryunosuke who she turns to. Meanwhile, Ryunosuke misses both Kazuma and Susato, but he in the text feels the empty place Susato left behind more. Perhaps it's because Kazuma is, at that point, dead to him (due to no fault of Kazuma's own) and missing him has become something unattainable; missing Kazuma won't bring him back. But Susato is still there, she is alive and she has carved her place next to him so strongly that Ryuu feels her absence like he is almost grieving her as well; he counts the days of how long they have been apart and feels depressed over how much time has passed. It's not the same without her, and living normally while she is away is a much bigger ask than living without Kazuma.

Then Kazuma comes back and it's not the same, and then Susato comes back and it is. Kazuma comes back and Susato and Ryunosuke are there waiting for him, on equal footing with each other, and Kazuma turns away from both of them just the same.

I don't want to drag Kazuma too much; he is young and still lost, despite how much more put together than Ryuu he seemed at the start. He is allowed to be that. The thing is, Kazuma doesn't allow himself to be lost; he can not allow himself to be lost. If he is lost, then he doesn't know where he is. If he is lost, then he has to trust someone else to show him the way. To be led by the hand out of the dark forest, instead of being the one leading; to be the one holding onto the hand extented to him, instead of being the one holding out his hand. And he is truly lost by the end, and threatening to lead everyone else around him deeper into the forest because he can't admit that he has no idea where he is going, and instead insists on the path he has taken, because he has been walking it for so long already and it has to lead somewhere, eventually; the forest can't go on forever. He just hasn't realised that even if the forest ends, it ends not because he will reach the clearing, but because there is ravine in front of him that he couldn't see in the dark.

Kazuma and Barok are very similar in this sense; both of them are inherently distrusting of the world around them because they have decided to be that way. Barok just stopped walking towards the darkest part of the path without a light slightly before Kazuma did because he recognised eventually that doing so would be utterly idiotic and self-destructive. Kazuma needed to be physically pulled back at the last second, but he did stop trying to break free eventually, too.