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Nanobot (Havana Parody) | A Capella Science ft. Dorothy Andrusiak

acapellascience · 1.5M views · 2018-08-25 · 3:21

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Overview

A Capella Science parody of Camila Cabello's Havana, retold as a song about molecular machines and nanotechnology. It features animations of rotaxanes, catenanes and molecular switches, and comes with footnotes.

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HN commenters recommend it as a catchy, accurate piece of science edutainment, and admire its footnote practice.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2024–2025

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What people said

082349872349872 · 2024-05 · Strong recommendation

My current song pedantry fave is Nanobot , perfected by a video with 18 numbered [refs]: [VIDEO] (presumably Brian May would have had his phases of astral matter correct in the first set of lyrics?)

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TeMPOraL · 2025-01 · Recommendation

Yup, DNA turned out to not merely be a sequence of triplets telling a dumb matter printer which hard-coded proteins to make - at least according to what little I understand of evolutionary developmental biology[0], DNA is much more like procedural generation in gamedev or demoscene. That is, there's plenty of recipes for various structures and body parts, and then there's lots of DNA that's responsible for conditionally enabling or disabling or modulating those recipes, depending on more DNA that controls when and where and how much to enable them, and then more - a complex network of logic . -- [0] - Didn't get much further than this four-minute intro to the field, but it is a good intro : [LINK] . (EDIT: It's actually the second part of a trio, that starts with a four-minute bottom-up overview of organic chemistry[1], and ends on a three-minute intro to nanotechnology[2]. I recommend the series together for how well it frames humans in relation to other life and universe as a whole.) [1] - [LINK] [2] - [VIDEO]

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ben_w · 2024-01 · Recommendation

> could we distinguish engineered vs emergent life? I think we can tell the difference between engineered and evolved (but note that simulated evolution is still evolution) — oddities like the path of the recurrent laryngeal nerve are cited as evidence against an intelligent designer, and I expect it isn't the only such oddity: [LINK] > But I really like that the answer to a most ancient question such as "what is life" is building up to something like "it's all nanobots controlled by molecular computers"... If you've not already watched it, I recommend this video by A Capella Science : [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by acapellascience, played through YouTube.

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