This is just horrifying in so many ways. I really can't put this strongly enough:
Psychedelics have the potential to be very harmful. Their use in therapy is still experimental and poorly understood. No one should ever attempt it except under the care and supervision of a doctor.
And it's not enough to screen the drug against every protein in your body. You also need to understand how it gets broken down, and test every product it gets broken down into to make sure none of them is toxic. And it can't get broken down too quickly, or it won't have a chance to work.
And even if the drug doesn't bind to anything else on its own, it might still bind in the presence of some third molecule, so you need to consider all possible combinations with other molecules found in your body.
Computation is a great tool and I hope it will improve the process. But it's not realistic to think we'll get anywhere close to 100% of drugs passing clinical trials. There are too many factors that are too hard to predict. That's why we do clinical trials!
Read what you just quoted.
The monotonic increases in health risk with increased consumption of processed meat suggest that there is not a 'safe' amount of processed meat consumption with respect to diabetes or colorectal cancer risk.
They couldn't be much clearer about it. You somehow quoted them, and concluded it said the exact opposite of what it said!
Also this passage, which again couldn't be much clearer:
We observed a statistically significant, nonlinear, monotonic increase in type 2 diabetes risk associated with higher processed meat consumption; that is, disease risk increased with increased intake at all intake levels but, for a given unit increase in consumption risk, increased most steeply at lower intake levels (Fig. 1a).
The risk increases monotonically with consumption, it's statistically significant, and it increases most quickly at low consumption levels. And they referenced the figure which you can see at a glance shows exactly what they said it did. How can you read that and conclude it says the opposite of what it says?
This article written by one of the authors of the study provides some insight on what is happening.
Normally, the cold, fresh surface water sits on top of warmer, saltier water deep below. This layering (or stratification, as scientists call it) traps heat in the ocean depths, keeping surface waters cool and helping sea ice to form.
Saltier water is denser and therefore heavier. So, when surface waters become saltier, they sink more readily, stirring the ocean's layers and allowing heat from the deep to rise.
This upward heat flux can melt sea ice from below, even during winter, making it harder for ice to reform. This vertical circulation also draws up more salt from deeper layers, reinforcing the cycle.
A powerful feedback loop is created: more salinity brings more heat to the surface, which melts more ice, which then allows more heat to be absorbed from the Sun.
The lower bound of their study was one a day. They didn't test amounts less than one a day.
That is false. You're taking one sentence out of the slashdot summary and assuming it reflects the lower bound of the study. It doesn't. See Figure 1 in the paper, which shows lots of data points at much less than one hot dog per day, and also shows a strong, monotonic increase in risk with dose at the very lowest levels.
"No safe amount" has a specific, technical meaning. It means your risk increases monotonically with the amount you eat. Eating a tiny amount only increases your risk by a tiny bit, but it still increases it.
Contrast that with things where your risk doesn't increase at all until you pass a threshold amount. We say the threshold is the safe amount, that is, the amount you can eat without any increased risk at all.
A double blind study means neither the patient nor the doctor knows whether they're in the treatment group or the control group. It has nothing to do with what is used as the control. When there's an existing safe, effective vaccine, you always use that for the control group. It would be unethical not to. It's still a double blind study, because the patient still doesn't know whether they're getting the new vaccine or the old one. And it makes the resulting data stronger, not weaker. It tells you whether the new vaccine is more effective than the old vaccine, not just whether it's more effective than no vaccine at all.
When there's no existing vaccine, then you use an unrelated vaccine as the control. That's essential. If you used an inactive placebo as the control, and a patient felt tired and achy the day after getting the shot, they could be pretty sure they were in the treatment group. That knowledge could affect their behavior and bias the results. So instead you use an unrelated vaccine with similar side effects as the control, so the patient can't infer which group they're in from side effects. This is standard practice.
But RFK has arbitrarily declared that won't be accepted. Instead you must use an inactive placebo, even though that gives worse quality data.
Sadly, this won't be coming to the US any time soon. RFK Jr. has arbitrarily declared that future vaccines will only be approved if the control group in the trials got an inactive placebo. Why? No reason at all, it's just an absurd requirement he made up. The control group in this trial got a conventional flu vaccine instead of a placebo (which would have been unethical), so it doesn't count.
I think SteamOS is the big "what comes next". They dominate PC gaming, but they're locked out of consoles. They're trying to turn consoles into open devices where people can run the Steam client and buy games from them.
The Maunder minimum thing is junk science pushed by denialists. It happened to overlap with the Little Ice Age in Europe, so they declare it must have been the cause. But in fact the Little Ice Age started well before the Maunder minimum, and the consensus is that it was caused by volcanic activity. It also was a local event, not a global one, which argues against it having anything to do sunspot activity.
These were preprints on arXiv. They weren't targeting a journal's peer review system. Presumably the goal was to get AI research tools to recommend them.
Contrary to popular belief, ostriches do not try to escape danger by putting their head into a hole in the ground. They're much too intelligent. Only a truly idiotic species would try to use that strategy.
things are far worse for job seekers who have clearly lost the arms race and are getting absolutely massacred.
If you find yourself on the other side of the process, you might change your view of that. The last time I had to hire someone, it meant going through hundreds of applications by hand to find the handful that were qualified. A keyword search isn't enough anymore, because the AI cover letters often include the right keywords pulled from the job description.
Applicants now use automation heavily. The result is an impossible task for any employer that doesn't use automation to filter them. The system is broken for everyone.
Although this is insane, in some ways it makes sense. AI has already broken the hiring process. People apply to jobs in bulk with AI generated cover letters, not even bothering to read the description first and see if they're qualified. Anyone trying to hire someone for a skilled job has to sort through mountains of applications to find the few qualified candidates.
If this adds a time cost to each application, it could help counter the trend. If applying for 100 jobs means getting invited to 100 computerized interviews, maybe you'll go back to being more selective about the jobs you apply for.
Take all studies like this with a grain of salt. A doctor doesn't diagnose a patient by reading a case study. They do it by talking to the patient, examining them, deciding what tests to order, etc. This is a contrived comparison that has little connection to how doctors actually work.
In case of atomic attack, all work rules will be temporarily suspended.
