Newsworthy Science

[Berzerker]

too bad the stuff is expensive, supply cant keep up with demand I suspect and it aint the easiest food to prepare

and..... the secret to its success may be tied to the extreme environment of the Andes

can we take it down off those mountains and grow it elsewhere while maintaining the desired qualities

or maybe it'll be even better

 

[Samson]

too bad the stuff is expensive, supply cant keep up with demand I suspect and it aint the easiest food to prepare
and..... the secret to its success may be tied to the extreme environment of the Andes
can we take it down off those mountains and grow it elsewhere while maintaining the desired qualities
or maybe it'll be even better

It does not seem that expensive, 68p for a Kg is about as cheap as food gets here. These instructions do not seem hard, I shall give it a go.

 

[Berzerker]

definitely...make it habitual

I've made a cursory effort but I have a renewed vigor this winter. I gotta get in shape or type II diabetes is in my near future if I dont have it already

I've read the early stages can be reversed with exercise and diet, I imagine that would help regardless of the stage

lol, I just started reading those instructions and I remember why I gave up

hell, my sense of smell and taste were ruined by modern chemistry so I dont care what it tastes like

just do it, man... My new years resolution will be a month early

Bingo! Here’s the trick for perfectly fluffy quinoa: Use twice as much water as quinoa, as usual, then cook uncovered until the quinoa has absorbed all the water. The cooking time will vary based on quantity.

Once the water is all absorbed, remove the pot from heat, cover it and let the quinoa steam for 5 minutes. That’s when the quinoa pops open into fluffy quinoa perfection, and that is how to cook quinoa properly.

okay, I'll give it a try

I think nasal spray diminished my sense of taste and unfortunately the foods I can taste are bad for me, fat, sugar, etc. Ice cream, Ribeyes, pizza

 

[Berzerker]

we cant clean up the Pacific

Coastal marine species carried out to sea on debris are not only surviving, they’re colonizing the high seas and making new communities on the floating plastic detritus that make up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Scientists, writing in the journal Nature Communications, report coastal plants and animals are sustaining themselves and even reproducing in the patch, an accumulation of trash stuck in ocean currents that’s estimated to be about twice the size of Texas.

Scientists have documented more than 40 coastal species clinging to plastic trash, including mussels, barnacles and shrimp-like amphipods, said Greg Ruiz, a senior scientist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and an author of the report.

it has become home to more than 40 species

 

[Kaitzilla]

Some new discoveries from the famous Miller-Urey Experiment.
It's so bloody obvious, why did none of us bozos think of it?

In The Beginning, There Was Soup

 

[Ferocitus]

Maybe there are some ideas that will be of interest to Civ modders in this anthology of results and observations by academics, judges and participants in the latest Generative Design in Minecraft (GDMC) competition.

Impressions of the GDMC AI Settlement Generation Challenge in Minecraft
https://www.researchgate.net/public..._Settlement_Generation_Challenge_in_Minecraft

 

[Ferocitus]

In The Beginning, There Was Soup

Then there was borscht.

 

[Berzerker]

I dont think we know much about what the Earth was like early on, I think it was massively reshaped ~4bya during the late heavy bombardment - life began shortly afterward so I suspect the impactors brought life or the impacts were integral to starting life. There is evidence the surface of the Earth was covered by water before the late heavy bombardment so the Hadean period is misnamed.

Who knows how deep the Earth's oceans were back then, if Europa is any indicator there could have been an ocean dozens or even hundreds of miles deep with a much thicker crust. The impacts tore much of the crust and water off enabling the process of plate tectonics - the surface of the Earth was shattered into pieces like cracking a cosmic egg.

 

[Samson]

Do emotions related to alcohol consumption differ by alcohol type?

Alcoholic beverages vary in the types of emotions individuals report they elicit, with spirits more frequently eliciting emotional changes of all types. Overall 29.8% of respondents reported feeling aggressive when drinking spirits, compared with only 7.1% when drinking red wine (p<0.001). Women more frequently reported feeling all emotions when drinking alcohol, apart from feelings of aggression. ~20% of spirit drinkers reported feeling chilled, versus half of those who drank red wine or beer.

Respondents’ level of alcohol dependency was strongly associated with feeling all emotions, with the likelihood of aggression being significantly higher in possible dependent versus low risk drinkers (adjusted OR 6.4; 95% CI 5.79 to 7.09; p<0.001). The odds of feeling the majority of positive and negative emotions also remained highest among dependent drinkers irrespective of setting.​

 

[Ferocitus]

I dont think we know much about what the Earth was like early on, I think it was massively reshaped ~4bya during the late heavy bombardment - life began shortly afterward so I suspect the impactors brought life or the impacts were integral to starting life.

And bacteria made their way deep into rock, where they could extract energy from whatever warmth and/or chemical double bonds they could, albeit extremely slowly, e.g. with metabolisms up to one million times slower than surface or lab-grown bacteria..

 

[Berzerker]

Maybe we can help save the polar bears. If these critters can survive clinging to a plastic island why not floating docks for polar bears? I remember how the sea lions took over some of the docks along the wharf in San Francisco, we could build artificial islands for polar bears.

 

[Berzerker]

are these critters on the island of plastic misfits actually eating plastic?

maybe they need saving, we just cant see the SOS

well, some critters are using it as a rest stop I'm sure... lotta water out there, I imagine even long range birds are using it to rest their arms

 

[The_J]

https://www.science.org/content/article/running-bulls-could-help-scientists-prepare-catastrophe

Running of the bulls could help scientists prepare for catastrophe
Study of crowd behavior finds counterintuitive results

[...]
Unexpectedly, the data revealed that the speed of the runners increased with the density of the crowd—up to a point. That’s the reverse of what researchers have typically found when studying the flow of people or traffic: Usually people slow down when crowds are more dense.
[...]
Eventually, density did spell disaster in Pamplona, too. Once the crowd swelled to about one or two people per square meter, the maximum velocity of runners dropped off sharply, often because people started to collide and fall over. Once the crowd surpassed two people per square meter, virtually no one could sustain speeds above a light jog (about 2 meters/second), the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

[Samson]

People run faster when pursued by raging bull shocker!!!

 

[Samson]

Quantifying social organization and political polarization in online platforms

I have only read the abstract, looked at the pictures and tried to skim for the descriptions, so I may have got the interpretation wrong. However, I thought some here would like it, I wonder if it will make many feel as old as it does me, because I have no idea what some of these are about. The most feminine of Hobbies 2 is bad women anatomy crochet and most masculine Sky Diving? The most left wing car talk is Golf GTI, and most right wing is ATV? Anime is really feminine and right wing? Movies and TV are left wing? Most people outside the US on Reddit are female?

Less of a surprise is that while the left has stayed relatively constant and not that polarised, the right has always been more polarised and got a whole lot more so after trump was elected (fig. 5).

Examining political content, we find that Reddit underwent a significant polarization event around the 2016 US presidential election. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, individual-level polarization is rare; the system-level shift in 2016 was disproportionately driven by the arrival of new users. Political polarization on Reddit is unrelated to previous activity on the platform and is instead temporally aligned with external events. We also observe a stark ideological asymmetry, with the sharp increase in polarization in 2016 being entirely attributable to changes in right-wing activity.​

Fig. 2: Macroscale social organization of Reddit communities.

Spoiler Caption :

Distributions of communities along the age, gender and partisan dimensions, grouped into behavioural clusters found by hierarchical clustering. The x-axis represents community scores transformed into percentiles (for example, a community with age score greater than 76% of other communities would be positioned at percentile 76), and colour corresponds to z-score. As a result, the distribution for all communities (top row) is simply the uniform distribution U(0,100), while the distributions for individual clusters illustrate which percentiles are over- or under-represented within the cluster. Raw score (non-percentile) distributions are shown in Extended Data Fig. 4. The dashed line indicates the 50th percentile. Rows annotated with † comprise two or more clusters

Spoiler More graphs :

Extended Data Fig. 4: Distributions of age, gender and partisan scores by cluster.

Spoiler Caption :

Distributions of raw age, gender and partisan scores, separated by cluster. Outlier communities that lie more than two standard deviations from the mean are annotated. Dashed lines represent the global mean on each dimension. Community descriptions can be found in the glossary (Supplementary Table 1).

Fig. 5: Ideological asymmetry in online polarization.
a, b, Average polarization of activity in the left (a) and right (b) wings, decomposed into seven cohorts by year of first political activity.

Extended Data Fig. 1: Distribution of community scores.

Spoiler Caption :

Left: distributions of communities on the age, gender, partisan, and affluence dimensions. Right: the most extreme communities and words on those dimensions. Word scores are calculated by averaging community scores weighted by the number of occurrences of the word in the community in 2017. Community descriptions can be found in the glossary (Supplementary Table 1).

 

[Ferocitus]

Study Can't Confirm Lab Results For Many Cancer Experiments
Eight years ago, a team of researchers launched a project to carefully repeat early but influential lab experiments in cancer research.

They recreated 50 experiments, the type of preliminary research with mice and test tubes that sets the stage for new cancer drugs. The results reported Tuesday: About half the scientific claims didn’t hold up.

“The truth is we fool ourselves. Most of what we claim is novel or significant is no such thing,” said Dr. Vinay Prasad, a cancer doctor and researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the project.

It’s a pillar of science that the strongest findings come from experiments that can be repeated with similar results.

In reality, there’s little incentive for researchers to share methods and data so others can verify the work, said Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers lose prestige if their results don’t hold up to scrutiny, she said.

https://apnews.com/article/science-...arcia-mcnutt-93219170405e3de753651b89d4308461

 

[Berzerker]

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12-sunshine-shield-children-young-adults.html

the participants who spent an average of 30 minutes to one hour outdoors daily had a 52 percent lower chance of MS, compared to those who spent an average of less than 30 minutes outdoors daily.

"Sun exposure is known to boost vitamin D levels," said co-senior author Emmanuelle Waubant, MD, Ph.D., professor in the UCSF Department of Neurology and of the Weill Institute for Neurosciences. "It also stimulates immune cells in the skin that have a protective role in diseases such as MS. Vitamin D may also change the biological function of the immune cells and, as such, play a role in protecting against autoimmune diseases."

might help explain vita d connection to covid protection

 

[Samson]

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12-sunshine-shield-children-young-adults.html

the participants who spent an average of 30 minutes to one hour outdoors daily had a 52 percent lower chance of MS, compared to those who spent an average of less than 30 minutes outdoors daily.

"Sun exposure is known to boost vitamin D levels," said co-senior author Emmanuelle Waubant, MD, Ph.D., professor in the UCSF Department of Neurology and of the Weill Institute for Neurosciences. "It also stimulates immune cells in the skin that have a protective role in diseases such as MS. Vitamin D may also change the biological function of the immune cells and, as such, play a role in protecting against autoimmune diseases."

might help explain vita d connection to covid protection

There is also a strong association between latitude and MS. Not certain yet, but there are a lot of things pointing to vitamin D being related. Also vitamin K2 and adsorption, but I know less about that.

 

[Berzerker]

Makes sense, think about Eskimos inside the Arctic Circle and the amount of sunlight they get. I never heard about their MS rates but they might be getting vita d in diets rich in fish oils etc. We need more medical investigators spending their time looking at, for example, MS rates by latitude to compare diets. I gotta believe theres a connection between cancer, geography, diet and pesticides.

 

[Berzerker]

"a new study reveals relatively healthy adults with cataracts or glaucoma who had cataract surgery were nearly 30% less likely to develop dementia later on — a benefit that lasted for at least 10 years after their procedure.

Researchers speculate sensory input gained from adults’ restored vision could explain the boost in brain health."

Miami Herald

if this is true wouldn't dementia rates in people with diminished senses be higher too? Maybe brains that have adapted dont show decline, eg people born blind or deaf or develop them early on whereas by the time people get cataracts they're getting older.

I need lasik and possibly cataract surgery in one eye, glasses dont help any more