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.
Awesome ! Could we have some sources, pretty please ? ^^
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.
Specifically, vaccination for herpes zoster. I will be trying to get my parents vaccinated for that. Dunno if they already are… Is it a “mandatory/suggested” vaccine in the EU? I need to check.
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With a lot of genetic diseases, lifestyle choices can definitely contribute to how early they’re contracted, or whether they’re contracted.
The reason it wasn’t mentioned is because they weren’t studying the mechanism of impact. The goal here was just showing the link between being vaxxed for other things, and having a lower risk for all forms of dementia; it wasn’t to show why vaccines lower the rates. My guess is lower inflammation rates, since inflammation does a lot to us
Edit: The next comment down (at the time of writing) also shows a link between inflammation/viral infections, and dementia
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.
I clicked one of the links, and read the study.
450ml of liquor per week isn’t light to moderate by most definitions? If you don’t drink 2 nights a week that’s 5 medically significant binges per week, every week. One “drink” in this context is 1oz (~29ml). Most of the doctors I’ve been to, when asking how much you drink, will even ask of you have 15 drinks per week. They cut that off at 7+.
While a lot of us don’t know the link to cancer, I’d imagine most of us know there’s something there.
I’m fine with doing alcohol like we did cigarettes, I was just kinda shocked that they called “5 medically significant binges per week” light to moderate drinking??? Even when I was drinking an amount that people were talking about doing an intervention for, it was less than half of that (1oz (29.5ml) per day)
450ml of what? 1oz of what? 100% ethanol? Drinks and liquor vary extremely widely and has no definition.
Liquor is commonly understood to be 40-50% ABV
None of this is really exact anyway. This is what doctors seem to go on
- 40%, 1.5oz liquor
- 12% 5oz wine
- 7%, 8oz malt liquoe
- 5%, 12oz beer
The problem is the beer I usually drink is in a 24 ounce can, and has 9.8% abv, and I don’t know a single person who would call that 4 drinks (which it is! One drink is .6oz of ethanol, and that can of beer has 2.4oz of ethanol)
Doctors try to get people to accurately report their lives because people aren’t thinking about this. I remember there was a place (Scotland maybe?) where they put how many “Units” of alcohol were in drinks, which I think is a good idea for these kinds of things. A unit seemed to be that 0.6oz (~17ml) of ethanol you get if you do the math on the earlier measurements.
I like a drink (obviously) as part of enjoying food, cooking, hosting and manage the risk by never having more than one in a day (this is probably 2 ‘units’ of alcohol if a cocktail or one if a glass of wine) but also not two days in a row, I try not to drink today if I did yesterday. Generally 3 drinks a week, 2 cocktails one glass of wine so 5 units. Sometimes less. I feel good physically, better than I did in the years I did not drink, but would not attribute it to drinking, we have more money now and better lifestyle overall, so slightly less stress.
450ml of liquor per week isn’t light to moderate by most definitions?
If you read the one published by the WHO, It says “light” to “moderate” is less than 450ml, presumably meaning 450ml and over is considered “heavy” (which more or less lines up with 2 drinks a day.)
Generally, light is considered to be 1 drink a day, moderate is 1.5 and heavy is 2. So 1 drink a day is the cause of half of all alcohol-attributable cancers (according to the WHO).
People wanted to intervene because you were drinking one short shot per day?
Yep. Admittedly they didn’t know how much I was drinking, just how often, compared to the fact that I only drink a couple times a month most of the time.
In the UK we measured alcohol in units the recommended limit being 14/ week. Spirits like vodka are served in 1 unit = 25ml. So their low to medium drinking is already more than the UK national recommendation by 4 drinks and you’d be getting advice on how to reduce your drinking by a Dr. Though that 450ml/week is real easy to get to that’s one vodka and coke per day if your free pouring rather than measuring. Many lay people wouldn’t consider that a problem at all.
Admittedly we do have a fairly problematic relationship with alcohol in this country.
Definitely agree with your take to make booze harder to get and more highly taxed like smoking. At least the younger generations seem to not be drinking so much.
Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of articles saying that GenZ is drinking less overall, and what they’re buying is nicer, which is making it harder for the alcopop companies that sell bulk cheap booze.
I think we tax alcohol higher in the States, and it depends on where you live for how difficult it is. Some places you can’t get any alcohol at the grocery store, some you can buy beer/wine at the grocery store, but anything harder is at a state-run liquor store, and some places they’ll sell you vodka at Walmart. There’s more variance, but yeah, depending on where you live alcohol’s more difficult to get than cigarettes, since those are at most grocery stores.
Anywhere you can buy food here you can probably get alcohol. Corner shops, petrol stations, supermarkets all have booze.
While a lot of us don’t know the link to cancer,
WHO classifies alcohol as carcinogenic as tobacco and asbestos. This is not new or controversial.
The comment this was a reply to was specifically about many Americans not knowing there’s a link. I wasn’t even disputing the link in the comment, more just pointing out that 2 cups of liquor seemed like a whole lot to be classed as “Light to moderate” drinking imo
Edit: The comment this is in response to links an article that states many Americans don’t know there’s a link between the two*
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.
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.
Is that really a recent discovery, i got taught that in school
Yes, recently (the past couple of years) the connection between small amounts of alcohol and increased cancer risk has been more thoroughly documented. Check the link from the WHO.
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.
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True and true. Though my usecase is just to keep it alive for a week or two. I can’t maintain it long term.
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?)
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Huh, neat! I guess it makes sense, light can make all kinds of other chemical things happen.
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 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.
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.
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.
First Leukemia patient got healed
sounds lit also involves stem cell transplant as well. since this usually how they go about it.
Leukemia patients have been successfully treated for the last 30 years.
treated and “cured” is very different.
Treated ≠ healed
You should have added the novel mechanism or a link to the study. Successful treatment is equivalent to healing.
There have been some recent studies on Dementia/Alzheimer’s that seem quite important for prevention, such as the link with inflammation such as periodontosis and viral infections..
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?
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While not exactly misinformation, your comment is presented in the same way as most fearmongering headlines.
Ionizing radiation causes cancer, It Is Known; it’s why there’s a limit on how many xray scans you can get in a year, and why they don’t give out a lot of types of scans without there being a clear benefit over the risk, which is what all of medicine is doing, because there’s always risk.
The way the comment is written is something that will stick in someone’s head as “CT scans are dangerous, I shouldn’t get one” which is where you cross into the territory of people downvoting.
this is a dangerous and misinformation comment,
You skipped this part:
Echoing a statement from the American College of Radiology after the study’s release, she stressed that the study’s projection of cancer diagnoses from CT scans was based on statistical modeling, not actual patient outcomes.
There are no published studies directly linking CT scans to cancer, the statement says. “Americans should not forgo necessary, life-saving medical imaging and continue to discuss the benefits and risks of these exams with their healthcare providers,” it continues.
You can tell whatever story you want from statistics, it could be that people that get CT scans have a higher chance of getting a cancer diagnosis because they are getting medical care and others just go undiagnosed.
The point isn’t that CT scans cause cancer, that was always a risk with any ionizing radiation. The point is that radiation exposure from CT scans varies wildly based on the operator and you should do what you can to reduce your exposure, but don’t skip a CT because of a scary headline.
Echoing a statement from the American College of Radiology after the study’s release, she stressed that the study’s projection of cancer diagnoses from CT scans was based on statistical modeling, not actual patient outcomes.
There are no published studies directly linking CT scans to cancer, the statement says. [emphasis mine]
Without hard data to back it up, this study is fairly meaningless.
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
