That clickbait’y titles are clickbait’y?
- A brand-new quantum state of matter discovered Scientists have observed something called the “pinball state” a weird quantum phase where electrons behave partly like they’re stuck and partly like they’re free, like pieces in a pinball machine. This was only theorized before, and seeing it in the lab helps us understand exotic quantum physics and could eventually influence future tech like quantum computers. Popular Mechanics
- Robots help find potential new antibiotics Using automated chemistry and “click chemistry,” researchers rapidly created hundreds of metal based compounds and identified ones that kill dangerous bacteria much more effectively than some current drugs. That’s a promising step toward new antibiotics for drug-resistant infections.
- Hidden ocean layer discovered in the Atlantic Oceanographers uncovered a previously unrecognized body of water deep below the equatorial Atlantic’s surface not a separate ocean, but a distinct layer that changes how we think about ocean circulation and could affect climate models.
- Some microplastics-in-the-body studies are being seriously questioned High-profile scientific claims that tiny plastic particles are everywhere inside the human body are now facing criticism: scientists warn that earlier results may have been contaminated or misinterpreted, showing how careful research still matters in this field.
Nr 4 sounds just like tobacco companies questioning if smoking causes cancer.
Tinnitus has been cured…just kidding…screeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…
Oh man, you just got my hopes up long enough for me to finish reading that sentence. Sad sigh.
how does it stop the genetic diseases, ALS and PARKINSONs are both genome related. it dint mention it all in the article. both of these are neurological disorders. it only mention dementia, and not the neuron degeneration.
Party pooper: Consuming alcohol significantly increases your chance of getting cancer. To the point that it compares with asbestos, radiation and tobacco.
https://www.partnershipagainstcancer.ca/topics/alcohol-policies/background-statistics/
https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/alcohol-use-cancer-risk
A recent study counters that info a little bit (says there isn’t a link for some cancers) but it’s important to note that the study is still disputed. Also, cancer is on top of liver and heart disease, dementia and many other things that alcohol is known to directly increase.
You should do your best to reduce your alcohol consumption or cut it out completely - if you care about your health.
To the point that it compares with asbestos, radiation and tobacco.
This is kind of ambiguous; it’s in the IARC group 1, which indeed includes asbestos and radiation. It also includes a lot of other things, like therapeutical hormones, many viruses and bacteria, being a firefighter, leather dust, being a painter, processed meat, wood dust, plutonium, vinyl chloride and outdoor air pollution.
Seems like the grouping is pretty non-specific.
Outdoor air pollution can include many different things. It can be an area where people are smoking for hours or roads of the times before catalytic converters.
TBF ingesting anything that’s not what the orifice in question is intended for might be harmless, but probably isn’t. Don’t breath smoke, don’t drink a concentrated light organic compound.
The WHO did a meta analysis, which is how they came to their conclusion.
The title “No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health” is slightly misleading though, since they focused on typical alcoholic beverages. There is no statement about alcohol in fruits.
Bottom line:
Drinking even a little bit of <alcoholic beverage> safe? Likely no.
Eating <fruit that contain low amounts of alcohol>: unknownFrom the WHO article:
Ethanol (alcohol) causes cancer through biological mechanisms as the compound breaks down in the body, which means that any beverage containing alcohol, regardless of its price and quality, poses a risk of developing cancer.
Risks start from the first drop
To identify a “safe” level of alcohol consumption, valid scientific evidence would need to demonstrate that at and below a certain level, there is no risk of illness or injury associated with alcohol consumption. The new WHO statement clarifies: currently available evidence cannot indicate the existence of a threshold at which the carcinogenic effects of alcohol “switch on” and start to manifest in the human body.
So no, you’re wrong, it specifically says your example is not “safe”. They said “beverage”, but consuming alcohol laden fruit would fall in the same category. The same would go for many “non-alcoholic” beers which are <0.5% alcohol, and many other things like kombucha, baked goods, chocolate, etc. You can debate whether they’re correct or not, but they were very clear that tiny amounts are not safe.
Now, it’s all about risk. And the more alcohol consumed, the higher the risk of developing cancer. The question is at what point the benefits outweigh the risk. Benefits could range from vitamins, minerals, fiber and healthy compounds, to reduced social anxiety and other psychological factors.
Thank you for your point of view. Since I have shared the article a lot of tibes myself, it’s nice to take another perspective on it.
I haven’t dived very deep into the research, but from what I have gathered the research did focus on beverages. Whether the alcohol content of a alcohol-free beer also falls into this category and therefore alcohol content in apples must be considered as well, was not conclusive to me. Sure, if fruits reach alcohol levels of average alcoholic beverages I suppose it’s safe to label them as problematic as well. But until then I’d like to avoid reading too much into the research, until it has been clarified whether this really does apply to alcohol levels like in fruits as well.
Is binging on fruits a thing humans do?
And why would it be any different from binging on a variety of other substances containing the same ingredient in common?
Habit? Tradition? There are establishments in town that sell beer, wine, whiskey, or cidre. It’s a thing, people do.
From a health perspective, I mean. If wine and beer and vodka all cause cancer, well wine is closer to a rotting pear than to the other two.
(Maybe you mistook me for OP)
I follow your logic. The alcohol in rotting fruit is the same substance in our drinks and most likely has the same effect. But, is this a problem that needs research? Who eats their booze?
How does it compare to CT scans? Asking for a friend.
I’m not a statistics expert, so very possibly bad wording or outright errors ahead.
Versus non-drinkers, 1 drink a day increases the absolute risk of getting cancer by 2% 2 drinks a day increases the absolute risk of getting cancer by 5%
(https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/alcohol/alcohol-fact-sheet)
Unfortunately, I’m having trouble finding the absolute risk increase for a single CT scan… But I think it is around 0.1%. This is based on the recent JAMA study that said that the scans from a given year (about 93 million of them) would it in 103000 future cancers developing.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2832778
A couple of takeaways: on an individual basis the risk of developing cancer from a CT scan is pretty low. On a population scale, its pretty damn high. Also though the increased chance is low (especially compared to the numbers above for alcohol) it’s actually pretty significant if you consider it takes just one scan.
Ballpark, you might be talking the equivalent of 3 drinks a month?
It’s an interesting question. I actually turned down a CT scan recently because it wasn’t clear what the benefits of knowing the results would be, versus this extra risk.
Not nitpicking your numbers at all (mainly cause im too lazy to go hunting down the original sources), but a big problem that science media gets completely wrong is how they report risk percentages. They conflate changes in absolute risk with relative risk constantly, and it really hurts messaging.
For example, a few years back, the WHO released a report on consumption of processed meat and how it relates to colorectal cancer risk. Even their own press release, which should be perfect, says “each 50 g portion eaten daily increases the risk by 18%”. That is really misleading if you dont know they are talking about a relative risk. The average person will interpret this as new risk %= baseline risk % + 18%.
The absolute lifetime risk of colorectal cancer is ~4%, so daily consumption of processed meat should bump it to ~4.7% (well, technically lower since the 4% includes processed meat consumers). Giving the before/after percentages helps communicate the risks way better. Even better is a risk curve showing how the risk changes as consumption increases (obviously that relies on the data being available).
Its also better to be able to contextualize so you can make well informed decisions across your life, e.g., it’s dumb to deprive yourself a joy that increases lifetime cancer risk by 0.5% while ignoring other facets of your life that increase cancer by a much larger margin.
I tried not to conflate absolute and relative risk. The numbers I was going with came from the link I posted, which was not from a science journalist, but from the US National Cancer Institute. Also, note that the comment you replied to was more about an off the cuff comparison of the risk between CT scans and drinking alcohol. It wasn’t meant to present scientific rigour.
Below is directly from the linked article, emphasis mine:
Using data from Australia, recalculated using US standard drinks, the recent Surgeon General’s Advisory reports that
- among 100 women who have less than one drink per week, about 17 will develop an alcohol-related cancer
- among 100 women who have one drink a day, 19 will develop an alcohol-related cancer
- among 100 women who have two drinks a day, about 22 will develop an alcohol-related cancer
This means that women who have one drink a day have an absolute increase in the risk of an alcohol-related cancer of 2 per 100, and those who have two drinks a day an absolute increase of 5 per 100, compared with those who have less than one drink a week. For men, the number of alcohol-related cancers per 100 is 10 for those who have less than one drink a week, 11 for those who have one drink a day (an increase of 1 per 100), and 13 for those who have two drinks a day (an increase of 3 per 100).
1 drink a day is quite a bit though, that is about the amount doctors ask if you drink more than here (14 units a week, 140ml ethanol).
As far as CT scans go I live in the UK, I doubt that the NHS is paying for that unless its actually necessary.
I have done published computer science research and am therefore a scientist.
I recently discovered that to keep potted basil plants from the grocery store alive longer, I must water them correctly: Every day you must fully soak under room temperature water, then hold over sink until it stops dripping.
Grocery store basil normally has about 3 plants (like the other person is saying). For best success, buy the SMALLEST plans, and un pot them when you get home. Shake them apart, but be carefull with the roots. A few broken minor roots is OK, but try not to break the major roots. Then plant them separately into their own pots. When watering, do not water from the top. Get a pot with multiple drain hole at the bottom edges (not the singular center hole kind) and place it in a watering saucer. Fill the saucer and let the soil wick up the water. This makes it easy to see when it needs water and makes it basically impossible to over or under water, just keep the saucer fill. Try to keep the plants in a warm and humid place if possible.
If you do it right, it ends up being easier to maintain and grows larger plants. If you want to look into how to grow the biggest basil plants then look into the pruning techniques to encourage growth. I have grown some monster basil bushes and they all started from grocery store plants unless I wanted a specific type.
Idk about where you are, but basil plants sold in grocery stores by me are always way way too densely planted. They throw like 25 seeds in one small pot, which puts out a lot of foliage to look good for a very short window. If you harvest basil like you are “supposed to”, any regrowth becomes basically impossible, and the plants die. The better way is to just cut off whole stems until there’s only one or two. Or, if you want to keep a basil plant, just buy one from a gardening store, not a grocery store.
deleted by creator
True and true. Though my usecase is just to keep it alive for a week or two. I can’t maintain it long term.
Alzheimer’s is reversible.
Per the study posted yesterday which i do not have handy but some enterprising soul may care to search for.
X to doubt.
You can find single studies claiming all kinds of crazy things. It keeps the popsci sites in business and apparently looks good to whoever is employing the yahoo researchers in question.
If there’s a credible medical breakthrough you’ll know because all kinds of scientists won’t shut up about it. After CRISPR was discovered back in 2016, it was absolutely everywhere for months.
This. Neuron damage is not reversible. That’s an absolutely dishonest claim
It seems that many people suffering from Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia experience occasional short episodes of lucidity (especially when nearing death).
This suggests that memories, personality, and reasoning ability might not be (entirely?) destroyed, but simply inaccessible or unable to work properly, and that if the root cause for this malfunction could be treated a partial or even total recovery might be indeed possible…
The “especially when nearing death” is entirely explainable due to the proximity to the death. No one is going to remember Aunt Ida’s moment of lucidity three months prior. They’re going to remember the one the day before she died.
Yeah, how memories are actually stored, and the actual input-output functions of neurons, are very much up in the air. Once the brain has sizeable holes in it I’m guessing a lot is just gone, but something might be retained.
Theoretically possible has very little to do with practically and recently solved, though.
It was from Case Western, fwiw, not livescience or fortean times. But yeah, it sounds so astounding i also have doubts. And yet. What a breakthrough.
I will wait for multiple replications in different populations before getting my hopes up.
It’s just mice.
Alzheimer’s is reversible
Bullshit. Is a neuron loss disease, neurons don’t come back from the dead.
Animal models do not get Alzheimer disease, and mice have a level of plasticity not seen in humans.
FDA has approved two Alzheimers drugs recently and neither work, and have caused deaths from brain bleeds. FDA is corrupt.
People will get a far more protective effect from Alzheimers from keeping current with vaccines.
Recreating scientific studies that have been funded by large corporations is very difficult and disproving or countering any findings are less common because to apply the scientific method properly is beyond skill and know how, it’s down to money.
getting grants from them is difficult, some professor spends most of thier time writing grants. corporations dont like to hear things like “this study is the result/fault of the industry that is funding the study”
I’m a researcher myself, so I feel like I can weigh in on the “reproducibility crisis”. There are several facets to it: One is of course money, but that’s not just related to corporately funded research. Good like finding or building an independent lab capable of reproducing the results at CERN. It basically boils down to the fact that some (a lot of) research is insanely expensive to do. This primarily applies to experiments and to some degree to computationally expensive stuff.
Another side is related to interest. Your average researcher is fired up by the thought of being the first person to discover and publish something no one has seen before. It’s just not as fun to reproduce something someone else has already done. Even if you do, you’re likely to try to improve on it somehow, which means the results may change without directly invalidating the old results. It can be hard work to write a good paper, so if you don’t feel your results are novel enough that they’re worth the effort (because they’re basically just equivalent to previously published values) you might not bother to put in the effort to publish them.
Finally, even without direct reproduction of previously published results, science has a way asymptotically approaching some kind of truth. When I develop and publish something, I’m building on dozens of previously published works. If what they did was plain wrong, then my models would also be liable to fail. I’ve had cases where we’ve improved on previously published work, not because we tried to reproduce it, but because we tried to build on their results, and found out that their results didn’t make sense. That kind of thing is fairly common, but not reported as a “reproduction study”.
There’s also review articles that, while they don’t do any reproduction themselves, collect and compare a bunch of comparable work. They usually have some conclusions regarding what results appear trustworthy, and what appear to be erroneous.
I’ve always considered sciences like psychology to be more susceptible to the reproducibility crisis. It seems if someone decides to pursue a career in academia the criteria becomes publishing, and well publish or perish as is goes.
I think some researchers areocing towards things like prerigistering hypothesis and open data+publishing source code for calculations and using that as references in there paper so it can be updated afterwards.
They’re have definitely been a lot of papers where results were later determined to be wrong but is still referenced because well you can’t update a paper from the 1970s.
This is hearsay from friends I’ve never done any serious research or published in journals. As a side note I do enjoy reading taking a scroll through https://retractionwatch.com/
Slightly unrelated tirade:
Background in psychology here: Psychology and sociology are also terrifyingly hard fields to pin down. Any one human’s behavior can be wildly inconsistent within a given set of parameters, and ppl evolve across time. Cultural context and social expectations come into play at and individual level.
Add in individual sensitivities to authority, understanding of a request, general intelligence, and you get massively varied outcomes that may change as a person grows and changes.
Then, for sociology, pile on group pressures and tendencies, plus group think and group cultural context (I have no background in sociology).
I truly believe psychology and sociology are great fields of study, that yield light on human truths. That said, from a technical scientific perspective, I think it’s nigh impossible to measure their value the same way as you would for mathematics or physics. At least, without finding a way to apply those fields to psychology lol
Replicating results is a problem across the board; I’m sure money is a factor but it’s not just the chocolate-sponsored-by-Hershey studies that have replication challenges.
This is very basic science but is exactly why I think it should become more common knowledge.
You can make water evaporate with just light, no heat needed.
This reads like those “we’re all glowing!” pop-science papers that don’t mention “black body radiation”. (As in, every 300 K lump of matter in the universe emits a non-zero number of photons in part of the em spectrum that human eyes could see if there were enough of them.)
Photons carry energy. Water does interact with light, which is why it gets dark deep in the sea. While I’m sure they’re measuring something, I don’t know if the obvious null-theory is skipped over by the reporter or the scientists. (What’s the control on that green light? Was it the same output wattage as others? What’s the thermal change with and without the light?)
deleted by creator
Huh, neat! I guess it makes sense, light can make all kinds of other chemical things happen.
Does the research into that only a handful of companies are the main source of earth’s pollution count?
Or that working less hours makes you more effective?
deleted by creator
this is a dangerous and misinformation comment,
Time for some pretty easy math; if 93,000,000 scans cause 103,000 cancer diagnoses, what percentage of scans cause cancer?
Its 0.11%. Each scan has a 0.11% chance of causing cancer. Thats slighty more than a 1 in 1000 chance for each scan.
Now, 93000000 and 103000 look like large scary numbers but when you’re comparing populations every number is likely to be large and scary. The absolute magnitude is meaningless; the important information lies in their proportion.
what a dumb comment
