This is awesome, I was talking about this with some friends, debating what is truly the best way to store data for long term (on the scale of thousands of years)
Backing up all of human knowledge and history onto such plates actually seems like a worthy endeavor.
Imagine if we had such detailed records about civilizations thousands of years ago!
We have demonstrated time and time again that if you have a bunch of data unencrypted, it is actually quite trivial to reverse engineer it and decipher it.
Dead sea scrolls, Rosetta stone, etc.
This would be terabytes of data, and likely organized in a way to make it very intuitive to reverse engineer even by someone who has no idea how it works.
We could even case study this. Give a loaded one of these slates to some scientists who have no idea how the data on them is stored and have them try and decipher it.
If they can reasonably succeed quickly with no knowledge on how it works, then it should be easy for someone thousands of years from now too.
I’ve always wondered what if there are multiple paths forward. Like the next people will be completely and unrecognisably different. We could be being bombarded with information from a former civilisation and we don’t know because we are just completely different.
Like if we never figured out wireless but had everything else, the history of the world could be being broadcast on the radio and we wouldn’t know it.
** I think people are waaaay more complicated than 3 arbitrary buckets. It’s the same reason Meyer’s Briggs is bullshit. Anyone who tries to pigeonhole people into all-encompasing categories does not really understand people
Seems there was a study that concluded female tears raise testosterone of men. I thus think it's kinda understandable they did it in this way. But, yeah, not really convincing.
If male tears were the only control, then they run the risk of not finding any result. If you have 3 groups, you need a substantially larger sample size because you are running a less powerful statistical test.
Easier to start with the test that’s most likely to work, and narrow it down from there if you succeed
I have experience and yes, it would not make it much more complicated. two types of controls are actually common although using male tears would not be a control. but like 5 research targets and 2 controls would not be beyond belief.
Just college lab courses, but come on, it’s pretty basic. The experiment merely tests a single variable by changing it while keeping everything else the same. There could have been dozens of different samples that men sniffed and it wouldn’t really make the data complicated.
It would increase the length of the test, though, so dozens of samples would have been cumbersome. But just two? Literally just “see how the test group responds to sample 1, sample 2, and the control sample”? That’s not complicated science. You probably did that in highschool lol
Testing multiple hypotheses this way still requires additional sample size because there is an increased error likelihood. From a statistical point of view, the most efficient test may be to stick to one variable like this.
I’m guessing they had to stay within their funding/budget and didn’t want to reduce the sample size to increase the number of variables tested. MRIs are expensive
they should just be getting time on the machine although maybe also tech time. either way doing multiple with a single individual is easier than more individuals.
But that makes it more complex because you have to start worrying about the order they’re done in because it might be different emotions playing your first or third game plus the effect might linger, take time to show, etc.
Far better to answer one simple question and prove there is an effect then follow up tests can look at finding the bounds to that and starting to narrow in on identifying mechanics.
I thought the same thing, so I checked the real paper and they do end up explaining their reasoning.
As for social interactions among humans, future research will explore whether the new study’s findings apply to women. “When we looked for volunteers who could donate tears, we found mostly women, because for them it’s much more socially acceptable to cry,” Agron says.
I’m interested if the results are same for male tears and also if they’re the same for women who smell either gender’s tears.
“Importantly, the study comes on the heels of several larger, higher-quality studies showing the exact opposite of its conclusions — namely, that these medications do not portend an increased risk of dementia.”
“If acid reflux is not controlled well, it can cause a variety of complications, including cancer at a later stage,” said Desai. So people should not be ditching their heartburn medications en masse based on alarming headlines.
While that’s true, it’s also apparent that Doctors in the US massively overprescrbe medicines for conditions that are often better addressed through lifestyle changes. Acid reflux is one.
The Vox article does a better job of communicating the findings without the hyperbolic headline. The study wasn’t explicitly designed to look for association. Nonetheless, the data is there.
Neither study does a particularly good job determining causality. The higher quality study was limited in time (3 years) and participant age but perhaps the findings also broadly apply.
So the last time was chloroplasts, right? And that worked out super well for all the other organisms and didn’t do anything catastrophic to the atmosphere, right?
As any farmer or gardener will tell you, nitrogen is critical for plant growth, and for most plants it’s obtained via the soil. Soil nitrogen can be depleted if not replenished (in an agricultural context, by compost or fertilizer), but there’s plentiful nitrogen in the atmosphere (which is mostly nitrogen, actually) so any plant that has nitrogen fixing abilities has constant access to this critical nutrient. There currently exist nitrogen-fixing plants (peas and clover for example), but they don’t actually do it on their own, they rely on a symbiotic relationship with bacteria.
Ooh could this make for a truly green way to capture carbon and make fertilizer? It would be sweet to have a closed system that grows the algea with solar then you collect it squeze the water out, bury it then start again
No, the symbiotic relationship means that the bacteria live in/on the plant, much like we have a gut biome of organisms that are discrete from us, but have symbiosis with us.
The article is about a bacterium becoming engulfed within an algal cell and slowly becoming an organelle of that cell.
This process begins as a type of symbiosis, but at the end of it you would no longer call it symbiotic, as it ends as a single organism.
The breathless yammering about “the last time this happened we got plants” seems a little much though. The last time this happened that we know of was 1.5 billion years ago and we got plants. The fact we’ve caught it in the act right now sounds like this might just be a much more common phenomenon than we thought.
The article says
In the 4-billion-odd-year history of life on Earth, primary endosymbiosis is thought to have only happened twice that we know of, and each time was a massive breakthrough for evolution.
It’s possible the only reason we’re aware of these events is because they were massive breakthroughs. After watching it happen, we may have more information about how to spot other times it has happened.
No plants are actually able to break down nitrogen gas. The bacteria that can break it down live in their root systems, not in the plant cells. The root systems are an ecosystem for the bacteria, much loke yoir moith and intestines are for useful bacteria. What this study describes is an algae cell incorporating a nitrogen fixing bacteria into it’s cellular structure, which as far as we can tell has only happened twice in the history of life on earth: when a large bacteria incorporated a smaller one, thus creating eularyotic cells with mitochondria (which was our last common ancestor with plants) and when another eularyotic cell absorbed a photosynthetic bacteria, creating plant chloroplasts.
This is interesting, thank you. So… I’m guessing we don’t really want wild plants to gain this ability? We really want to control this ability? What would happen if all plants gained this ability – would we have any nitrogen left in the atmosphere? I’m guessing we personally (as a species) need the current mixture of air compounds to be a certain way (the way it is now, pretty much) in order not to be poisoned? I’ve heard about oxygen poisoning – that’s a thing, right?
Or we might want to have some plants gain this ability in order to do terraforming of another planet which has mainly nitrogen in its atmosphere, very far into the future? Would be cool. Maybe.
The N2 in the atmosphere go through a lot of conversions in the bacteria and plant but eventually ends up as nitrates which then break down and release N2 back in the atmosphere.
So no we won’t end up with no nitrogen in the atmosphere. Generally we want more nitrogen fixed as most crops deplete the nitrogen and only crops that host the nitrogen fixing bacteria can replenish the fixed nitrogen in the soil.
This is the main reason for crop rotations. Farmers grow corn that depletes the fixed nitrogen and then soy that has bacteria that replenishes it.
It would be great if corn got that feature as a lot of fossil fuels are used to fix nitrogen for fertilizers. See the Haber process for more info. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
Fun fact, one half of the invention of the Haber Bosch process Fritz Haber also invented chemical warfare.
He’s partially responsible for saving perhaps billions of lives through the Haber Bosch process and killing millions through the use and proliferation of chemical weapons.
Nitrogen is crucial for duplicating DNA, which needs to happen for vells to divide. Despite being over 70% of the atmosphere, nitrogen gas is incredibly inert, so most organisms cant use it for any metabolic purposes. There are many bacteria that are able to break down nitrogen gas into useable nitrates, most famously those that live in the root systems of legimes like soy and peanuts, which is why American corn farmers grow so much soy.
Whilst this is cute and really only a university research project. It’s always worth remembering there is a long history of tech companies coming in with their new wheelchairs with special features that are unmaintainable and unrepariable as soon as the startup failed which is usually pretty quickly.
newatlas.com
Hot