I believe you are referring to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...”>The Day the Earth Stood Stupid, which is the Futurama episode where the Brain spawn attack Earth. Fry is impervious to their attack, ostensibly because he is “special”, which allows him to save the world. One of the best of the series in my opinion.
For those who are interested in looking at the actual data, you can find that here,
https://atvb.apprisor.org/epsA...
(No thanks to Business Insider for not providing a link to even the conference proceedings.)
The finding is very interesting. I think it is clear, despite the small sample size, that there is a clear association between microplastic concentration in plaques and stroke symptoms. What is not known is whether the microplastics are somehow contributing to the disease or are just present in this selection of patients. There is no discussion of comorbidities, for example. There is some speculation. The stroke victims appear to have evidence of higher inflammation levels, but there is no correlation with microplastic concentration.
Overall, I would say very interesting. As usual, more work to be done, however.
Agree on the zoning and permitting hurdles, but the two main drivers of home construction cost are 1) cost of the land, and 2) cost of labor. So it should not be any surprise that a state with one of the highest land resale costs in the country combined with the highest cost of living would also have the highest cost of new construction. It does not help that zoning often enforces low density building, but if it costs $500k just to buy an empty lot (more if you have to buy one with an existing building on it), and then you have to pay $400/sqft for new construction on top, that developers don’t even want to touch a project if there is no possibility to sell for $1.5M+.
No, AlphaFold 2 predicted 200M structures. The distinction is critical. A scientist running homology models on his own probably can’t crank through as many as fast as an automated pipeline, but it is a lot more than 1 per year. Also, the predicted structures are of varying quality and there is significant bias in the classes of proteins represented. So you don’t have some 20,000 structural biologists out of a job, you have 20,000 structural biologists able to focus on the harder and more impactful problems that AlphaFold can’t handle.
It’s an interesting analysis, but too simplistic. University budgets are a lot more complicated than the impression you are giving here. For one, total budget - tuition revenue != state appropriations. To get the actual state revenue you have to look at the audited budget which provides a lot more insight,
https://www.ohio.edu/sites/def...
In 2023, OU received $186M in appropriations from the state, which accounted for 26% of its total revenue and did not include appropriations for capital improvements or federal/state/local grants and contracts. Tuition accounted for 40% of its total revenue. So student tuition revenue was about 1.5x higher than state appropriations revenue.
Unfortunately, these audited budgets don’t go all the way back to 1980, so we can’t make an easy comparison, but we can look at the historical state budgets,
https://www.lsc.ohio.gov/asset...
From this you can see that expenditures toward higher education has decreased as a percentage of total expenditures from 17% to 10% from 1980 to 2023, but the actual expenditure amount has increased from $741M in 1980 to $2.7B in 2023. That amount tracks inflation fairly closely, so the real story here is that state university budgets have vastly outpaced inflation. The logical question then is where, how, and why?
Correct. Google can pay to license iMessage from Apple and deploy it on their own infrastructure. Problem solved.
Ok, that was a bit tongue-and-cheek, but the essential problem here is nobody wants to absorb the cost of an advanced messaging system. The carriers took a long time to agree to a very limited RCS and have been dragging their feet to fully implement it. I’m sure that’s at least partly because they know users will not likely stomach going back to per-message text fees, especially for non-user visible features like E2EE. So Google and Apple have independently developed their own messaging services that run on their own infrastructure, and the cost is amortized by device sales (and advertising fees in the case of Google).
Why should the govt mandate that? Are Android users going to pay for iMessage, or are they just going to be freeloading on Apple’s servers?
Many plants with huge genomes have many, many copies of a much shorter functional genome.
Indeed, and unfortunately the summary left out this important blurb from the paper describing this species of fern as an octoploid,
Tmesipteris oblanceolata subsp. linearifolia has been reported, like P. japonica, to be an octoploid, but it has a much higher chromosome number (2n = 416 versus 2n = 407,19). Its massive genome is thus considered to have arisen through the combined effects of repetitive DNA accumulation and polyploidy, as in other species of the genus.
The purpose of the copies has never been clear to me, but I would imagine it's protection against damage.
It’s certainly an interesting question and actively debated. You may find the perspective of this recent paper interesting,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
It’s a combination of cool, but early stage, research, combined with a perceived need to hype potential future capabilities to attract funding. Fairly common academic strategy where “thing” exists as a potentially enabling technology, but is not anywhere near commercialization.
In this particular case, what they have developed is actually pretty cool from multiple perspectives: long-lasting neuronal organoids in microfluidic devices, a remote orchestration system to do wetware expts, and an ability to parallelize experiments.
In their paper,
https://www.frontiersin.org/ar...
they describe it as a tool to enable research experimentation at the scale that would be needed to design an actual computing framework using biological neural nets. So they are advertising this as a collaborative platform for researchers who don’t have the expertise to develop and run microfluidic tissue experiments in their own labs.
The Neuroplatform enables researchers to run experiments on neural organoids with a lifetime of even more than 100 days. To do so, we streamlined the experimental process to quickly produce new organoids, monitor action potentials 24/7, and provide electrical stimulations. We also designed a microfluidic system that allows for fully automated medium flow and change, thus reducing the disruptions by physical interventions in the incubator and ensuring stable environmental conditions. Over the past three years, the Neuroplatform was utilized with over 1,000 brain organoids, enabling the collection of more than 18 terabytes of data.
Sounds pretty useful to me, but probably never commercializable on its own.
Remember in the early days of COVID when a paper came out saying HCQ (hydrochloroquine) could be used to effectively treat COVID? And yet no one could replicate the results?
Not being able to replicate the results does not necessarily mean there was fraud. It could simply be regression to the mean, which is a common problem in biomedical research due to small sample sizes and/or non-random sampling or other confounders. Just saying.
Um ok, so the average person with a body weight (in the US) of 80 kg, would need to consume 360 mg a day every day for weeks to experience this adverse effect. A typical teflon pan, before they discontinued use of PFOA, might have had a residual 1.1 ug (that’s micrograms) left after the heat treatment that was supposed to destroy it.
https://montrealgazette.com/te...
So what is the serious danger to the public that was concealed exactly? Dose matters.
Honestly, the biggest issue for me is size. I need a 7 seater with cargo space, and no, the jump seats in the back of a model Y AWD for $50k doesn’t cut it. Until the cost of batteries comes down enough to make a real affordable SUV, it’s just not an option for me.
I'll probably buy one more ICE, to span the time where we have to wait 5 - 10 years for a SSB, and then be EV forever with the battery described as 1/2 the size, 1/2 the weight, 1/2 the cost, charge in 10 minutes, and doesn't catch fire.
If you think SSBs that are cheaper, more reliable, and with better range will be here in 5-10 years then you better hope the models you are looking at will have full autonomy, because Elon said FSD would be released tomorrow.
Don’t get me wrong, I would like to see them within 5 yrs too, but I’m not placing any bets.
Yes. A 1 minute search on Wikipedia could have told you this.
Yes and no. If you’re considering the rate of single strand breaks, then yes. But you aren’t going to store data this way because at the resolution of a single nucleotide you would only have 4 bits, so you need a byte encoding method that uses a stretch of nucleotides, and if you do that correctly you can include some sort of ECC. Also, if you look at living systems as models there are several additional redundancies. The first is double-stranded DNA, which uses complementarity to fix many errors. The second is at least two copies of the molecule (human cells are diploid, for example). And the third is most complex organism are multicellular, so you have many cells with the same information. You could interpret this last mode as just a generalization of the second mode, but you have the added benefit of encapsulation of the molecular information in separate compartments which creates a non-uniform mutation rate among cells. So the “consensus” information is still easily preserved even if 1-5% of the cells have been heavily mutated.
All that said, I am still highly skeptical of using DNA as a practical storage medium. In order for that to work, at least one of three things would have to be better than magnetic or solid state storage: density, reliability, or cost. At the current stage, so far none of these are true.
Crazee Edeee, his prices are INSANE!!!
