Massive Science

We've been using TakeShape as the CMS behind Massive (https://massivesci.com/) for the past year and a half and have had a great experience. It's allowed us to rapidly prototype new features without much technical overhead. We knew from the start we wanted to serve static pages for simplicity and security, but so many existing SSGs rely exclusively on rendering folders of Markdown. While this makes sense to developers, we found most editors (the people) need WYSIWYG tools to do their jobs well. But even on the dev side, it's lent us way more speed and flexibility for prototyping and iterating on data structures and features underlying our publication without any of the maintenance of a more traditional solution like Wordpress or Django. Right now I'd totally recommend this to freelancers, design studios, or teams who want to deploy something static without sacrificing usability. The one downside is that it does require somebody with web dev experience to provide the templates to present the content. It's a really unique product that stands in a sweet spot for product-minded teams between something like Jekyll/GH Pages on one end and Squarespace on the other end. I'm looking forward to seeing how it grows.

Devang Mehta had a great essay on why he had trouble being a researcher in GMO - not due to GMO but the negative perceptions of culture/people around him about it: https://massivesci.com/articles/gmo-gm-plants-safe/

"If the question is “are both hypotheses possible?” the answer is yes. Both are possible. If the question is “are they equally likely?” the answer is absolutely not. One hypothesis requires a colossal cover-up and the silent, unswerving, leak-proof compliance of a vast network of scientists, civilians, and government officials for over a year. The other requires only for biology to behave as it always has, for a family of viruses that have done this before to do it again. The zoonotic spillover hypothesis is simple and explains everything. It’s scientific malpractice to pretend that one idea is equally as meritorious as the other. The lab-leak hypothesis is a scientific deus ex machina, a narrative shortcut that points a finger at a specific set of bad actors. I would be embarrassed to stand up in front of a room of scientists, lay out both hypotheses, and then pretend that one isn’t clearly, obviously better than the other" https://massivesci.com/articles/sars-cov-coronavirus-covid19-lab-leak-…

Though a fun thought experiment, this book isn't up to date with modern knowledge and isn't taken seriously by archaeologists. It also doesn't hold much water when the theories proposed are empirically tested. Grand narratives are legacy science. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-eurasia-dominant-east-west-axis.html https://massivesci.com/articles/chaos-in-the-brickyard-comic-matteo-fa…

Already technical work arounds: tooth hearing aid : https://newatlas.com/hearing-aid-tooth/14042/ contact version of google glasses : https://massivesci.com/notes/smart-contact-lens-google-glass-eyes-eyew… https://newatlas.com/wearables/team-hart-vibrating-sleeve-language-com…

I don’t believe this is correct, for California. Needed legislation was recently passed [1] to decrease liability and relax environmental restrictions, of the controlled burns, which both were largely responsible for preventing them [2], beyond people just not wanting them near their homes. Here’s some history [3]. 1. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-07/newsom-signs-fire-… 2. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/202… 3. https://massivesci.com/articles/megafire-california-climate-change-wil…

99% of Americans have PFAS in their blood made by Dupont and other companies. This is because the US allows corporations to invent new chemicals and sell them to the public without any regulation. People all over the world now have PFAS in their bodies as a result of the capitalist rot in the US. We didn't ask for this, and yet we're all subjected to it. PFAS are forever chemicals that will last centuries. https://massivesci.com/articles/dark-waters-pfas-focus-features-mark-r…

We don’t have this data, because this is such an outrageous experiment, who would have thought to mask children for hour son end before 2020? I’d wager that no IRB board would have accepted such an experimental setup anyway. But we really should have the data before engaging in real-world experimentation on children. The closest we have is some data in macaques. https://massivesci.com/articles/facial-recognition-patches-brain-macaq…

Indeed "Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres[...] California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire." https://massivesci.com/articles/megafire-california-climate-change-wil…

A continuously updated list of bad genetics studies https://massivesci.com/notes/gwas-complex-behavior-bad-biorxiv-genome-… the only reason why not most GWASare listed there is because it does not pay to prove that a GWAS is a nonsense, it is way too much work to disprove, and you don't get paid/supported for doing so

> It shouldn't even be physically possible for a prisoner to assault another prisoner. I'd even give the prisoners privacy so that they can't see or hear each other. Oddly, people argue that it is somehow cruel to protect the prisoners from each other. Solitary confinement is cruel. It isn't protecting one prisoner from another. Solitary confinement increases the chance of heart attack, hypertension and stroke by 30% [0]. That's because it is a stressful environment that people are not meant to function in. [0] https://massivesci.com/notes/cardiovascular-health-comparison-solitary…

Hi all, Quick note: the headline is from a Massive Lab Note (https://massivesci.com/notes/scientists-just-cut-the-tolerable-intake-… while the link above is pulling from an Oct 2018 article related to an ongoing US health study about safe limits of several PFASs. I skimmed comments below briefly--PFASs are used as processing components to create non-stick cookware. They can be emitted directly from the cookware as Teflon breaks down, becomes scratched, or is overheated. The "legacy" PFASs have been largely phased out, with replacements like GenX taking their place. These replacements offer similar toxicological consequences compared to "original" PFASs.

It is an area ripe for disruption, but probably not in the way you thought of. We already know that we need to do more and better controlled burns to manage the fuel sources. However the current funding situation more or less forces the Forest Service to spend most of its funding on active fire fighting instead of controlled burns (ie, they just need more money). See: https://massivesci.com/articles/wildfire-prevention-california-control…

The smug confidence when the outlets assert these things is one of the most galling parts: > Babies and young children study faces, so you may worry that having masked caregivers would harm children’s language development. There are no studies to support this concern. https://twitter.com/AmerAcadPeds/status/1425857041457942542 There are "no studies" because you can't do studies like that on humans! I guess absence of evidence = evidence of absence now. What about on monkeys? > The face-deprived monkeys and control monkeys were scanned by fMRI when they were six months old to measure their neural responses to faces and other visual stimuli. > Control monkeys had face patches by the time they were six months old; the face-deprived monkeys did not. Patches for other visual categories that both sets of monkeys saw equally, such as hands and bodies, were roughly equivalent between the two groups. https://massivesci.com/articles/facial-recognition-patches-brain-macaq…

> Isn't this generally highjacked by the timber industry to protect valuable "product?" At least in some cases, the main restriction is environmental protections laws and liability concerns. You want to start a controlled burn? What's the risk? What species live in the area? Are any endangered? Are you sure? Will anyone be hurt during this blaze? Have you filed the environmental impact statement, risk mitigation plan, incident management documents, and obtained approval from all relevant agencies? How much smoke will it generate? What's going to be IN the smoke? What do you mean you don't know the exact contents of the smoke; how can you get a permit for emitting smoke without knowing what in it? Etc. In California in particular, controlled burns need approval from the local Air District, and they have to give approval on the day. It's not unheard of for a planned, approved burn to be shut down at the last minute because the day is a bit too smoggy already. There's always someone willing to pop up and argue against the controlled burn; local residents worried about safety, or even the American Lung Association worried about smoke inhalation. Also, the people in charge of starting burns can be held liable if they go wrong, but will not be held liable if they opt not to start a burn, and then disaster ensues. It's possible the timber industry is somewhere behind that, but we seem quite capable of hamstringing ourselves "honestly" too, so I'm not sure. In any case, yes.…

Wow! That was awesome (also frustrating and poignant.) Should be on the front page of HN, IMO. I can't write a coherent reply right now, but I wanted to mention some things: I dream of a world where people can step out of their kitchens and pick their produce from their own gardens, but I know that, realistically, you're right about automation. Most people don't want to tend a garden. But I'm an amateur roboticist and gardener and I'm not confident that automation will be at all easy. Even with the recent advances in ML, et. al., it's going to be hard to displace humans (after all, we are adapted to gathering food from plants.) The easy-to-automate farming might turn out to be microbes ( https://massivesci.com/articles/iwi-algae-protein-nannochloropsis-food… & http://boostbiomes.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20687797 ), and/or marine farming ( https://www.greenwave.org/ ). I'm hoping that it might be possible to make dense "food forests" near to population centers and people can come and glean for themselves. I had an idea for a kind of member-supported farm with a restaurant on-premises. Folks drive out (by appointment) for a fancy meal sourced (mostly) from the farm/garden around them, membership would include a certain number of meals. There's a lot of little details (members can purchase surplus produce online and pick it up after their meals, etc.) - - - - What about some sort of small online distributed Farmer's Market,…

- Elevated rates of HGT in the industrialized human microbiome. Transferred gene functionality reflect the lifestyle of their hosts[0] - HGT from bacteria and plants to mycorrhizal fungi. These genes are functional[1] - More about fungi sharing genes[2][3] - Lab experiment showing HGT can act as a directional evolutionary force in bacteria adapting to antibiotics[4] - A species of fungi used HGT (mostly from bacteria and some from eukaryotes) in order to adapt to colonize apple trees[5] - A call for a replacement of neo-Darwinism with a new evolutionary synthesis that takes into account the role of HGT (among other things)[6] Ok, so I didn't save the actual paper I was paraphrasing. I thought I'd read it in Annual Reviews, but I can't seem to find it. However, I hope I provided enough sources to show that: (1) fungi often share genes across phylums, (2) we have clear examples of elevated rates of HGT in microbiota faced with a new environment, and (3) HGT can play a critical role in adaptation [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867421002415 [1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2018.00701/full [2] https://massivesci.com/articles/fungi-gene-plants-mutualism/ [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6643240/ [4] https://www.pnas.org/content/117/43/26868 [5] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep33129 [6] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2009.1679