We have a large sheet of all there is to know. There is a small area in the middle that is mapped, that's what we know, it is surrounded by blank space, that's what we don't know. As we explore further, the small area expands, but by doing so, its border also expands, meaning that the more we know, the more unknown we are exposed to.
We expanded the area a little on the tardigrade side, so as expected, it revealed more areas to explore than what we discovered. As a general rule, science more often expands our borders than fills up holes, meaning that the more we know, the more we realize the extent of what we don't know.
> Every fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. students what a Ph.D. is.
> It's hard to describe it in words.
> So, I use pictures.
The second problem is that gives the false feeling that science works like a religion, where everybody has the same ideas and moves in the same direction as in a priesthood following divine rules. Couldn't be more wrong and damaging.
Saying "scientists" does not add relevant info. "We finally figured out why..." or using the passive voice would be the same, but less insulting. "A team in the university/company X" would be even better. Is the right way to show a minimum respect by all the hard work of this people.
Journalists don't do this by inertia because science was never in their pool of potential customers paying for advertisement, so they traditionally "don't deserve" the right to be treated as individuals.
And when they pay, here comes the overcompensation. The equally annoying opposite effect, where entire articles are centered around worshiping the person. Building a polished public image of TV celebrity. All his bullshit about their epic journeys and how they managed to help everybody despite everybody putting obstacles in the path. If you are lucky, you can find a couple of lines about the real discovery, placed between a photo of somebody eating ramen and another doing surf.
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Well I have a newfound fear of humans creating a bacteria as hard to kill as a tardigrade…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudomonas_aeruginosa
Eventually we'll get to a point where nothing will work against these
Thankfully, there are major tradeoffs associated with those traits, which makes them not particularly virulent to healthy people.
Article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/scientists-glean-new...
Going from "Tartigrade-specific intrinsically" to a single T in the acronym is rather interesting...
Funny, I always thought the electron microscope images of tardigrades looked like the monsters in HAZMAT suits from Monsters Inc.
https://www.intelligentliving.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/...
When desiccation begins and TDP is activated, it engages a process known as vitrification. Boothby said, “The glass is coating the molecules inside of the tardigrade cells, keeping them intact.”
Not that cryonics are necessarily in a better position about that, so I guess for comparison between those methods the point stands regardless.
It's just another tool to understand how virusses work. Always has been.
ain't nothing like flipping 6-year-old news articles, right lads?
There’s lots of problems humans can create that “nature” couldn’t precisely because we drastically compress time scales that make adaptation exceedingly difficult.
I guess that's because it's barely used:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=acronym%2Cinit...
Maybe some people have tried to push it as a new word in common usage but they don't appear to have succeeded.
Maybe that's what they mean.
Not that long ago that parts of the globe were for centuries warmer up to 5 degree celsius and then fallen into a mini ice-age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
Reality is quite cold, literally.
This reasoning is like the fear of a some random TESTED C++ code destroying the internet, because "it might do things that you don't expect in the long run". Well yeah... it might... but...
The worst part is, we can stop building the foundations of this type of technology, but our geopolitical opponents will not.
The good news is that "race" is a social construct, not a genetic one. Very little genetic variation differentiates between groups of people, and the differences that exist do not map onto socially recognized categories of race.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23882
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1078311
https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1438
I can help you access the full text of all cited research if you can't get it through your library or employer.
I can certainly see it being China's final solution to the Uyghur question. They have a long history of callously and needlessly killing large swaths of their own people toward nationalistic ends, and not just under Communist rule.
Snake: Those enzymes recognize the target's DNA?
Naomi: Right. They respond by becoming active, and using the macrophages, they begin creating TNF epsilon. It's a type of cytokine, a peptide which causes cells to die. The TNF epsilon is carried along the bloodstream to the heart, where they attach to the TNF receptors in the heart cells.
Snake: And then...they cause a heart attack?
Naomi: The heart cells suffer a shock and undergo an extreme apoptosis. Then... the victim dies.
It's a little too late to "stop building the foundations". That's like wanting to "stop building the foundations" for the tech that allows governments to spy on civilians. We're about 20 to 30 years passed that.
Who are they?
Saying climate always changed so it's ok is like saying you'll die eventually so it's ok if you die tomorrow
> better understand that climate has always changed and will continue to change.
I think virtually no one ever argued against that: https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=48
But Little Ice Age lasted centuries and was only .5C. I hadn’t realized it was still happening until global warming erased it in 150 years. Then we added another 1C in less than 50 years. We are on track to warm another 3C by 2100, the amount of warming from real ice age in century instead of millennium.
Yes, then look 3 cm down and see a massive fucking swing with 20 times more amplitude than both of the mentioned events...
I stand by what I said, without the labels you wouldn't see these two events, meanwhile even without the label you can see the current trend is absolutely nowhere close to any other past changes
If you are old enough, at least learn from the past two decades. Every single time that our goodwill was placed to believe the news drama, the end-result are overwhelming taxes on the west while forgetting about the major culprits of pollution in India and China.
Where are the XKCD man-child cartoons teaching about that?
Our society today doesn't behave that differently from medieval scientologism. In that sense humans are just like the climate, changing only ever so slightly.
I also honestly do not understand why China is the bogeyman here given that Long Island, NY was the eugenics capital of the world within living memory. Utah, the state in which I live, didn't shutter its own eugenics program until the 1960s. I'm trying to recall when China dropped nuclear ordinance on civilian populations and really failing here.
I figured it's probably a western bubble thing and sure enough most people in most countries don't view China as the obstacle to world peace. https://fullfact.org/news/america-world-peace/
And just because we haven't figure it out doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If you take a baby born to two sub-Saharan African parents and a baby born to two Northern European parents, and keep them in boxes with identical stimuli from birth, they will have drastically different skin tones. If that's not genetic, then what is it?
Such a thing does not exist:
> Our understanding of the genetics of melanin formation and distribution within cutaneous and follicular tissues has recently greatly expanded through the power of genome-wide association studies (GWASs) using large databases such as those of the UK Biobank (22) and 23 and Me (51). This research has provided new insights into the biology of skin and hair color and underscores the highly polygenic nature of these two traits, with complex epistatic interactions apparent between the genes involved.
(https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-genom-0831...)
Again, there's no biological basis for "race":
> People today look remarkably diverse on the outside. But how much of this diversity is genetically encoded? How deep are these differences between human groups? First, compared with many other mammalian species, humans are genetically far less diverse – a counterintuitive finding, given our large population and worldwide distribution...
> Early studies of human diversity showed that most genetic diversity was found between individuals rather than between populations or continents and that variation in human diversity is best described by geographic gradients, or clines. A wide-ranging study published in 2004 found that 87.6% percent of the total modern human genetic diversity is accounted for by the differences between individuals, and only 9.2% between continents. In general, 5%–15% of genetic variation occurs between large groups living on different continents, with the remaining majority of the variation occurring within such groups (Lewontin 1972; Jorde et al. 2000a; Hinds et al. 2005). These results show that when individuals are sampled from around the globe, the pattern seen is not a matter of discrete clusters – but rather gradients in genetic variation (gradual geographic variations in allele frequencies) that extend over the entire world. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that major genetic discontinuities exist between peoples on different continents or "races." The authors of the 2004 study say that they ‘see no reason to assume that "races" represent any units of relevance for understanding human genetic history. An exception may be genes where different selection regimes have acted in different geographical regions. However, even in those cases, the genetic discontinuities seen are generally not "racial" or continental in nature but depend on historical and cultural factors that are more local in nature’ (Serre and Pääbo 2004: 1683-1684).
(https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/human-skin-col...)
I'm not saying it wouldn't be an unbelievably complex signature, but it would be a signature nonetheless.
