Recent content by MrCynical

Hilarious. Even with decent academic institutional journal access, I can't find a full text of this. Few people would even be aware of this paper but for her complaining. I will be fair - from the sample sizes discussed in the abstract, the study most likely is statistically insignificant crap...

I haven't really read up on this, but this seems dubious to me. When culturing cells in a lab, we almost always use antibiotics in all of the growth media to protect against bacterial infection. Mammalian cell cultures get completely ruined if bacteria get in there, as they're effectively living...

You haven't missed it yet - it's not till tomorrow night. :) Although the weather's not looking too promising for seeing it round here.

I'd really love to see someone publish some statistics for what the crime rate is for Tory MPs compared to the general population. There's got to be enough for a statistically significant sample by now...

It's been fairly common knowledge among those in the industry for years that phenylephrine does practically nothing. Derek Lowe over at the excellent "In the Pipeline" blog gave a pretty good summary of this over a year ago, and even then it was a case of "seriously, how long is it going to take...

The snag with considering each specific chemical in isolation is you incentivize making very minor modifications to the structure to get something that is technically not the banned chemical, but which is functionally indistinguishable. Both in terms of industrial applications and negative...

The citation issues don't get much better further down the line. Next up at [3] we have Darwin's Origin of Species - apparently in it's entirety since they don't give a chapter or page number - as a citation for the statement "a new approach to understanding and quantifying selection is...

Yeah, I remember this coming up in the thread earlier I wasn't too impressed by it back then either. Certainly every time it tries to talk about biology (or for that matter chemistry), it goes into grandiose sounding waffle that seems to flat out misrepresent the current state of understanding...

I'm not sure who could reasonably be said to have put Liz Truss forward as a patsy other than herself. Most Tory politicians were not subtle that Sunak was the one they wanted for PM in that leadership contest. She only got the position because she managed to be even more shameless than him in...

There's an open access full text of the study over on Springer, although it doesn't really offer much to address this point. I'd also raise the problem that ChatGPT's own adherence to factual reality is rather sketchy at the best of times, so I'd be cautious about equating it's "default" answer...

The Meissner effect by definition is a product of superconductivity. There are some other kinds of magnetic levitation effects that occur, but they wouldn't be in remotely the same league in terms of impact. The Meissner effect here is only really of interest as a diagnostic of whether the...

Yeah, I heard about that - there's a paper draft up on Arxiv, but it's not peer reviewed as yet. Also there's a video floating around the web purporting to show off a chunk of it levitating a magnet via the Meissner effect (kinda - it's not the clearest demonstration, compared to what you'd...

Not the issue. When dealing with ethics in research (and more generally in medical matters), not being dangerous isn't sufficient. I don't get to run experiments on people without their express permission, given freely. Saying "oh, but the experiments are safe", even if true, will not sound at...

There's a number of related molecules that "Estradiol" is used to refer to, with somewhat different effects. Normally with HRT and so on, it's the 17-beta isomer that's being used, which very definitely is feminizing. There has however been investigation into other estradiol isomers, in search...

It's very iffy as far as consent goes, as the kid is presumably still dependent on him at that age. Experimenting on your own body is one thing, but once you start involving others, especially at that age, it's an ethics issue. Looking at this from the perspective of a research scientist, I...