Science in the News

I haven't had time to read them yet, but the following titles fit with your remarks: How a newly discovered body part changes our understanding of the brain (and the immune system) (2016) https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2016/how-a-newly-discovered-body-pa… Brain’s lymphatic system, just recently discovered, now linked to aging and Alzheimer’s (2018) https://www.fiercebiotech.com/research/brain-s-recently-discovered-lym… Lymphatic Vessels Discovered in Central Nervous System (2015) https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lymphatic-vessels… Brain cleaning system uses lymphatic vessels (2017) https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/brain-cleaning-sy…

> I think the difference between human "races" is greater than just exterior colouring No. http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-reshaping-race… > Thus, there is no evidence that the groups we commonly call “races” have distinct, unifying genetic identities. > Ultimately, there is so much ambiguity between the races, and so much variation within them, that two people of European descent may be more genetically similar to an Asian person than they are to each other > In the biological and social sciences, the consensus is clear: race is a social construct, not a biological attribute etc.etc.etc.

"or, till satiety" That is the key. You can eat vegetables until satiety and also not gain weight. Banting seems to be about non-processed whole foods. So guess I'm doing that. My point was more, there is a group that goes 'zero carb' and eat really unhealthily. They take it as a license to pile on the ribs. Not that 'zero carb' by itself is unhealthy. You'll probably say cholesterol is also ok. But plaque buildup does lead to hearth attack's. "Unfortunately, emerging research shows that a ketogenic diet actually increases the risk of cardiovascular disease. In a young, fit population of CrossFit athletes, following a keto diet for 12 weeks led to an average weight loss of 6 pounds but increased “bad cholesterol” (LDL-C) by a whopping 35%. Typically, you would expect to see LDL-C levels drop when you lose weight. LDL-C has long been associated with cardiovascular risk because it forms arterial plaques (a cholesterol build-up in the inner lining of arteries), and emerging research that followed people for 12 years has now directly linked long-term ketogenic" https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2023/keto-its-probably-not-right-fo…

Critiques of caloric restriction (CR) studies include issues with control groups in animal research where these groups might eat more than usual complicating comparisons. Also, CR's benefits could vary based on eating habits and may not apply to everyone. There's a concern that extreme CR can weaken the immune system among other issues like bone density loss etc. The overall impact of CR on health and longevity clearly needs more research to be understood. While its undeniable that some of the strains of mice and fruit flies did live longer, extrapolating that to humans and associating that with "health fasting" is questionable at best. If this becomes a viable technique for human health and life extension it ought to be undertaken in a supervised and managed way with the assistance of health professionals. Not sold as a magic treat-yourself cure for all ailments on the internet. All in all CRL outside of an academic and scientific setting is almost certainly just going to spread dangerous misconceptions about health and our bodies. > "Well fasting is hardly a consumerist conspiracy, as that would be a contradiction." No fasting clearly isnt but most of these "health fasting" diet types also shill other dangerous "health" advice from juice "detoxes" to radioactive "aura cleansers" About that "CALERIE" trial: "many of them had BMIs that fall in the overweight category at the start of the trial. This means that any health benefits observed cannot be fully decoupled from…

I’m wholeheartedly against facial recognition in legal systems. The fact is that they don’t work well, and they specifically have a bad tendency to identify the wrong black person much more often than they misidentify white people. From [3] below: > Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men, depending on the particular algorithm and type of search. Native Americans had the highest false-positive rate of all ethnicities, according to the study, which found that systems varied widely in their accuracy. One. Hundred. Times. The camera may say it recorded John Smith breaking into a house, but it’s incredibly likely that it was actually Ron Jones. Who’s the jury going to believe, though: John Smith who was at home with his girlfriend at the time, or the hugely expensive video system that the city just bought? Facial recognition doesn’t work. It’s bullshit tech, and we should stop using it until we make it deliver on its promises AND decide how to deal with its ramifications. [1] https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discrimination-in-face-… [2] https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recognize-black-f… [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/19/federal-study-con…

The problem with GMO is that it's intertwined with intellectual property shenanigans favouring corporations over traditional farmers, and upsetting traditional methods of farming. > Are you infringing a patent by selling your soybeans that contain a minor amount of contaminating Roundup tolerant seeds from your neighbor’s land? Are you infringing a patent by replanting those seeds? While you don’t intend to use or sell Monsanto’s crops, intention is not material to patent infringement. All that matters is the mere existence of Monsanto’s crops in your harvest. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/the-patent-landscape-of-geneti… Granted, GMO is not the only type of crop affected, but it has a greater overlap with those practices than non-GMO crops. > Farmers worldwide increasingly find themselves unable to legally save, share, sell, or breed with their own seeds. https://www.opensourceseeds.org/en/about-us

>This is exactly the kind of absurd, completely surreal type of argumentation I’m talking about. You’re literally comparing a smartphone to one of the most dangerous and addictive opioids available, responsible for 15 000 overdose deaths annually in the US alone. You've missed the whole point. I'm answering the crap argument "Phones have value. That’s why people use them." - showing that people use things that don't have value (and can even be hamrful) all the time. It's not about the relative danger of phone vs heroin. It's about "people use it, thus it has value" is a crap argument. In fact, I also included fast food (which people don't overdose from), on my counter-argument, which you conveniently ignored. >And in case you perhaps didn’t actually read my comment, I pointed out the fact that I was one of those people who visited grocery stores in the 90s, which is why I know that doing it today is easier than it was back then. That’s the whole point. No, the whole point is that it's only marginally easier, to the point of hardly being worth it just for those kind of conveniences, while creating its own problems, which can have a much worse impact in one's life than "I missed the grocery store open times"... http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-tim… https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171130090041.htm https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352853217300159

It's a great article, loaded with information, and very insightful. But I'm left disappointed that there's no actual estimate of maximum information content. Just this: > *[Note from Tony Zador: The length of the genome, which in humans is around 3 billion letters, represents an upper bound on the Kolmogorov complexity. Only a fraction of that carries functional information, however, so the upper KC value may be quite a bit lower than that]. That must be 3 x 10^9 base pairs, in the haploid genome. Wikipedia tells me that's 800MB.[0] However, only 1%-2% of that codes for proteins.[1] Which is basically what Zador's note says. So what's possible for the rest? While 800MB doesn't seem that much, maybe it's enough for basic "firmware" and "software". Including instinctual behaviors. But even all that is clearly not enough for a full blueprint and assembly instructions. That, as TFA explains, must flow from interactions during development. 0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome 1) http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2012/issue127a/

Just to be clear, he was talking to High School students, so perhaps sacrificed a little accuracy for the sake of making a point. I still think the general idea is sound, even if you don't take it literally on implementation Just to address that for the sake of that dude, I didn't want it to come across the wrong way. To address some things further down: I do remember a specific detail, and I don't know how accurate it is, however, he did explain that (and also prefaced how theoretical it is, even at that time more so I imagine): - If you wanted to do this right, what you would want to do is desalinate the water and pump it to existing surface basins/reservoirs first (e.g., the Colorado River Basin), and taking great care to match that water to the ecology (e.g., mineral, PH level etc) of the water you are replenishing This way you aren't forcing an entire set of infrastructure to be obsolete, but rather working with existing delivery modes to get the water where it needs to be - In cases where this isn't feasible, your best bet would be to run some sort of infrastructure (likely pipes) to those in need. In some cases, you might even be able to simply create new reservoirs to feed population centers to create efficient delivery mechanisms. The other thing I remember him mentioning specifically is there are many delivery mechanisms (e.g natural) ones that were no longer in productive service that could be revived also (I wish I had an example for this, but I…

No, Lead is not magnetic to any significant degree. What happens is that calcium is very important for your neurons to operate and signal each-other, and lead happens to be "close enough" that is competes/interferes with those mechanisms, gumming things up permanently. This causes the cells and their connections to wither and die, or to fail to form properly at all. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2016/deadly-biology-lead-exposure/

I hate to break it to you but AI has been ubiquitous and taking people's jobs for decades now. [0] is an interesting article on the subject. The cat's out of the bag, and humanity isn't doomed yet (at least not due to AI). I'm not convinced. [0]: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/history-artificial-intelligenc…

Is it just a "silly mistake" though? One could argue that racial & gender biases [0][1] in image recognition are real and this might be a symptom of that. Feels a bit disingenuous to simply chalk it up as something silly. [0] https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discrimination-in-face-… [1] http://gendershades.org/overview.html

Well, for life to emerge you likely need some kind of liquid medium/solvent to enable chemicals to move around and interact with each other. It's hard to imagine how that could happen in a solid/frozen environment. So, assuming a liquid solvent as a basic requirement, the next question is, what sort? There are other options beyond water, but water actually some unique properties that make it a potentially ideal medium - not least it's less dense when frozen. This meant the seas in early earth never completely froze, with liquid water remaining under the surface. If ice was heavy than water, then ice would sink, the oceans would likely have completely frozen, and no life would have evolved. More discussion here: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/uncategorized/2019/biological-roles-of-wa…

I'm not the OP, but you realize that implying they were looking at the kids as spouses for themselves is extremely creepy right? (Not that I agree with what the OP said either - I think most people have a protective instinct towards all children without thinking of them as potential spouses for their own offspring. We see this behavior in other primates too, eg: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2021/mountain-gorillas-adopt-orphan… )

Non-gmos use pesticides, nearly all farming does, and usually more than GMO crops. Eg https://i0.wp.com/sitn.hms.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/fig2… From https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/gmos-and-pesticides/

Presumably it detects a head partly through recognizing a face. Apparently facial recognition works better for males than females, and lighter skins than darker. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discrimination-in-face-… There should probably be a default presumption that this gun is racist and sexist, to be overcome by lots of testing.

Monsanto introduced proprietary GMO crops that were resistant to Roundup so you could easily wipe out every plant that wasn’t the crop (aka “weeds”). It was a package deal. > In 1996, Monsanto introduced the Roundup Ready soybean, a genetically engineered crop resistant to glyphosate. In the few years after, Roundup Ready cotton, maize, and various other crops also made their debut. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/roundup-ready-crops/

Presumably in the context of medical testing. It's a common point made in journals to this day: - https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/why-drugs-tested-in-mice-fail-… - https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/science/testing-of-some-deadly-dise… - https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/mar/20/mice-clinical-trials-h… and a humorous take: - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/01/scientists-ask-are-mice-…

I don't think that is sufficient: - Perhaps the model can be improved by adding sentences, but which ones? There is a potentially infinite amount of sentences to add and no good way to select them - Your proposed method handwaves the method of acquiring "many problem challenges that it hasn't seen before", which just moves the problem. Constructing a problem set containing the full range of potential problems to solve is again a Very Hard Problem. The second problem is not just theoretical either: see https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discrimination-in-face-… for example, where a facial recognition algorithm performed much worse on non-white women because the training set didn't contain enough pictures of them. AI software is notorious for finding this kind of loophole and for overfitting itself for the training set rather than for the real world.

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discrimination-in-face-… While I'm sure some algorithm is provably unbiased, it's a little naive to imagine landlords (you know about the landlord special? Load bearing paint and the likes?) caring about what they are running.

I have been hearing for at least 20 years that calorie restriction increases lifespan [0]. I have not seen compelling evidence of this, but I know a lot of people believe it. [0]: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/can-calorie-restriction-extend…

> If that was consistently true we would already be in an Idiocracy scenario. Been on Twitter, Facebook, or Hacker News lately ? More seriously, I really fear this kind of stuff is, to some extend, new : https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-ti… (Although, maybe it's comparable to the "opium epidemics" of the 1800s ?) Ironically, I should stop having this kind of conversation... On social network.

Earlier. In 1721 in Boston, a bomb was thrown at proponent of smallpox inoculation. There were far earlier methods than that, I assume they too faced witchcraft-like accusations and such. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/special-edition-on-infectious-disea…

The lesson I'm taking away from this is if the U.S. wanted to support its increasing senior population and improve the loneliness epidemic [1] _and_ obesity epidemic, buying up malls and retrofitting them into public community spaces would be a huge step in the right direction. [1] https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/loneliness-an-epidemic/

Adding on: Though there is no consensus, I believe that is now the less-popular theory for the origin of spiciness. It seems instead to be a form of pesticide and fungicide. Evidence for this is that pepper varieties tend to be spicier in wetter environments, where the biological resources spent on producing capsaicin to fight fungus are more valuable than preserving them in case of drought. Source: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2012/issue131b/

This article [0] points towards the reality being somewhere in the middle - more herbicides but less insecticides. > GMOs have been changing the way that pesticides are used in agriculture. Herbicide-tolerant genetically modified (GM) crops have led to an increase in herbicide usage while insecticide-producing GM crops have led to a decrease in insecticides. [0] https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/gmos-and-pesticides/

By now it's fairly well known the most addictive apps & sites exploit your dopamine system to keep you hooked in: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-ti…

You could say we do those things better or with greater complexity, but they are all there in other species. 1- Language: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2019/river-dolphins-surprisingly-la… 2- Complex tools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals 3- Symbolism: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080610212404.htm 4- Visual Art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowerbird 5- Music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoomusicology#Music_produced_by_animals 6- Religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_behavior_in_animals

The vast majority of that empty land is either in less ideal climates out in the west or on federal land. See: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Fig1.png

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discrimination-in-face-… https://futurism.com/delphi-ai-ethics-racist https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-bias-photog…