Possibly untrue science news

South American lungfish has largest genome of any animal

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“What Southampton presents probably has a higher durability, however, this begs the question: what for? Future generations? Sure, but how will they know how to read the crystal? How will they know how to build the device to read the crystal? Will the device be available in hundreds of years?” he added. “I can barely connect my 10-year-old iPod and listen to what I listened back then.

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Patients who received infliximab demonstrated a greater willingness to exert effort in pursuit of rewards compared to those who received the placebo. This increase in effortful behavior was closely tied to a reduction in signaling pathways directly targeted by infliximab, particularly TNF.

This is interesting to me because of my Crohn’s disease, which can cause inflammation in the brain (as well as in the joints & eyes). For example, I started having partial seizures a year or so after being diagnosed with Crohn’s back in the early 1960’s, so I’ve always wondered if it was due to brain inflammation. So maybe it can contribute to depression as well, which I also have (needless to say most of that is probably a result of just suffering that illness as a kid and teenager).

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From Nature:

AI scans RNA ‘dark matter’ and uncovers 70,000 new viruses

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Credit for this justly celebrated interpretation of Star Wars belongs to Phil Palmer; I’d only like to point out the way it makes sudden and perfect sense of everything that happens in the film. “The time has come, young man, for you to learn about the Plot.” “Darth Vader is a servant of the dark side of the Plot.” When Ben Kenobi gets written out, he becomes one with the Plot and can speak inside the hero’s head.

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On September 12, 2024, Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel at Justice Catalyst Law filed a federal antitrust lawsuit on behalf of plaintiff Lucina Uddin in federal court in New York against six commercial publishers of academic journals, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, Sage, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer, on behalf of a proposed class of scientists and scholars who provided manuscripts or peer review, alleging that these publishers conspired to unlawfully appropriate billions of dollars that would otherwise have funded scientific research.

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I remember reading about this back when I worked for the FDA. Profit margins were around 40% (as they still are) – despite the fact that there was a several thousand dollar fee to publish a paper. And peer reviewers got absolutely nothing.

It’s a scam and nothing more. Researchers should use (and create) more open source journals like PLOS

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Fucking finally, some exposure of this crap. I doubt it’ll cause actual movement though. The Money don’t give a shit, they’ll just take as a green light to stack the board. Aaron Schwartz was right.

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A new method lets anyone with a kit write data to DNA with just one enzyme.

Hmmm, modifying epigenetics made simple. Couldn’t possibly see anything going wrong here…

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Many animals, including humans, have developed a taste for alcohol in some form, but excessive consumption often leads to adverse health effects. One exception is the Oriental hornet. According to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, these hornets can guzzle seemingly unlimited amounts of ethanol regularly and at very high concentrations with no ill effects—not even intoxication. They pretty much drank honeybees used in the same experiments under the table.

No wonder they seem so pissed all the time! Now I just feel bad for them.

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Known as the “infinite monkey theorem”, the thought-experiment has long been used to explain the principles of probability and randomness.

However, a new peer-reviewed study led by Sydney-based researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta has found that the time it would take for a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets and poems would be longer than the lifespan of our universe.
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There would be a 5% chance that a single chimp would successfully type the word “bananas” in its own lifetime. And the probability of one chimp constructing a random sentence - such as “I chimp, therefore I am” - comes in at one in 10 million billion billion, the research indicates.

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In theory, practice and theory are the same but not in practice.

Sort of reminds me of the betting strategy you can never lose money if you double your money on every loss.

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Or Practice does not make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.

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I saw this pop up in my feed a few days ago, and I was rather confused… I’ve always heard the infinite monkey theorem worded as an infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite amount of time, not a single monkey.

Making it a single monkey (or even 200k) and the lifespan of the universe is just a tad limiting comparatively.

That’s rather close to the phrase I often use: “You know the difference between theory and practice? In theory, there is no difference”

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